dr bob

I've had good luck using a few little spots of high-tack gasket edhesive on the pump side only, just enough to hold the gasket in place during installation. Mostly I put the gaskets in dry, mostly because they are such a pain to remove from aluminum when they are glued on. No failures using this method. Puttin the sealer/adhesive on the pump side only means that the gasket will come off with the pump next time you do this job.

Hylomar is wonderful stuff, and I've used it on the oil gasket on the tensioner. I'm not sure it wouldn't seal dry, but I used it anyway. Big use for it is on bolt threads that go into coolant galleys. It stays resilient and seals even in non-tapered threads, and doesn't weld the bolt to the block. I suspect the Yama-Honda-SeaDoo bond does that too, and that's why it's popular. The Hylomar can be spread a lot thinner than any of the gray goops, if that makes a difference.