I turned wrenches for Yale and Hyster dealers most of the 25 years I have been in the business and rebuilt these Mazda engines and did many head gasket jobs as well.

My rule of thumb on these Mazda engines was, I rarely replaced the bolts and I never had a failure of any of them that I worked on. These engines are fairly low compression, low RPM engines with a low torque value on the head bolts.

I always chased the block with a tap and chased the threads on the bolts with a die and ran the bolts through the wire wheel to make sure they were smooth and clean. I used a light grade oil about 1/3 of the way up the threads and torqued them in 3 stages through the torque pattern and used a quality gasket.

And as I stated earlier this is for these 2.0 Mazda engines and not all engines.