One thing that I was curious about with the copper gaskets was, how will the copper fill the receiver groove? Will it just bow down across the groove? What will the resulting bulge of copper look like?
It's actually very cool how the system works. The receiver groove is your typical groove. A squared off groove. When you remove the copper gasket after it having been installed, you see that the copper that was pushed into the receiver groove by the o-ring has completely filled the groove. The copper forms into a squared off notch! Do you think maybe that gasket is anchored in there good? Holy cow.
My feeling on the MLS gaskets for my application was, if I'm running enough cylinder pressure to have the heads scrub the gasket, I didn't want it doing that against a very thin sheet of material. And I was worried about the heat transfer ability of those thin sheets. A thin sheet of material does not have much strength if the head starts lifting and combustion gases are working past them.
A thick single sheet of copper gasket will hold up better in the case of a head lifting and will take the heat better than a few very thin sheets of steel.
I was thinking in paricular about when I really start putting the power to this engine. I've really only just touched the start of what this turbo and engine are really capable of, and I knew cylinder pressures were only going to be escalating higher. Did I want to install the mls gaskets and find their limit, again being forced to finally upgrade to THE GASKET SYSTEM, or should I just bypass that step and bite the bullet? I decided that I had much more to worry about besides my head gaskets. It was time to go Pro Copper.
That was my logic for going with the copper over the mls in my situation. The majority of you will be fine with mls, I'm sure.
