Is there a preferred head gasket material? I see copper and "paper." Preferred vender?

Thanks
Jonathan

If you want you can reuse copper head gaskets by annealing. With a propane torch get gasket red hot and dropping in a bucket of water.
Even the old British guys anneal there new gaskets before installing.

you just have to get it red hot, quenching in water only cleans old stains off. Once it is red hot it is annealed

There you go,

I agree. Copper gaskets are usually reusable at least once.

Another interesting FYI is when using copper gaskets between unlike metals, you can coat both sides with silver spray paint. It allows the dissimilar metals to expand at different rates while not scrubbing the gasket.

I always anneal copper head gaskets... new and old. (Unless the new gasket is already soft, which is rare these days.)

Pillsbury is correct in that, unlike steel or other metals, all that matters is heating the copper gasket... just has to reach about 1400 degrees or so (red hot is a good estimate). Also, you don't need to get the whole gasket red hot at the same time... you can move around the gasket and as long as you get the whole thing red hot even a piece at a time it will be annealed.

Once it hits that high temp, the copper molecules rearrange and the metal goes soft... afterwards if you cool it slowly over hours or drop it in a bucket of ice water... won't matter.

I like throwing it in water because any scale tends to come off leaving a nice clean copper surface.

Interesting to know...in the muscle car world head gaskets are definitely one-time only. Dealing with higher compression maybe.

I've seen scrap yards selling used Yamaha copper head gaskets and I thought really?? They'd sell the rust if someone would bite.

So I take it the copper one is the way to go?

Thanks
Jonathan

I believe that you would only use paper/cardboard as a base gasket, not for the head. Happy to be corrected though!