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That’s an internet fallacy - there’s known tech bulletins posted around that state conditions that head bolts can be reused and when they should be replaced. If you know the engine wasn’t cooked badly I’d reuse the head bolts. GD talks about cleaning them up of any scale and running a tap (or modified old head bolt) down each thread to remove any gunk in there. As NVU says, if they squeak or squeal while torquing at any stage that head bolt won’t be done to proper speck and you’ll end up with the same issue. I’m not 100% sure on what the required action in this situation is - eg: back off all bolts, replace offending unit then restart the procedure or do that ^ and replace the head gasket you just fitted. I hope this helps. Cheers Bennie

No. No practical way and worse than that - no one at the dealership that is A: Skilled enough to do it, and B: Willing. You see every technician at the dealer level is paid "flat rate" - so they get paid book time. And when you can do a 2.8 hour spark plug job in 1 hour and get paid for 2.8 hours..... or you can troubleshoot some random CAN code that at best is going to take MANY hours and you will get paid probably for fewer hours than you actually spend.... which are you going to choose? They are going to scan it - write "unable to reproduce customer complaint" on the invoice, get paid their 0.5 for the scan tool diag and move the heck on to an actual paying job. They don't have the skills and the dealer isn't going to pay them for the research necessary to acquire those skills for one problem child car. It's not economically viable. Now you are beginning to understand..... Could a team of engineers with a laboratory equipped with a dyno that can angle and shake the vehicle while it is simultaneously driving under various ambient conditions and is hooked up to CAN sniffer equipment, and all 4 channels of half a dozen oscilloscopes find the problem? Given enough time..... YES! Is that likely to be funded by you or anyone else? No - as a society we will just throw that car away and build another. This is how it's basically always worked with technically complex manufactured products. Hell my LMTV (US Army truck) had an electrical fault that took ME eight months to find. Because it was intermittent and the troubleshooting documents and the engineers that designed that particular system (yes I spoke with them - multiple times) did not foresee this particular interaction of failures and so the symptoms could not be correlated with the actual problem. I eventually found it by pure force of will and by resorting to testing every single wire end-to-end for every component involved in the subsystem exhibiting the problem. I found a manufacturing defect in the truck's wiring harness by application of brute force, time, and a lot of luck. And that truck has no CANBUS in the sense that none of it's modules talk to each other. The US government spent $230,000 to purchase that truck in 2008. They sent it to Kuwait and then shipped it back to El-Paso. From 2008 to 2017 the truck accrued 2,045 miles of use, and was then deemed "surplus to needs" and (probably) because of the electrical fault and some minor damage (not related to the electrical and easily repaired with only bolt-on replacements) it was not selected to be upgraded to full armor so was sent to auction. This is the DOD - with a budget of $860 billion. It was deemed not economically viable due to a single wire not having been soldered correctly at the factory that "in practice" no one could actually isolate. So the whole truck was sent to the corn field. Sadly - unless you want to become an expert in CANBUS networks and sniff out the problem yourself - at the cost of great expenditure of time and effort - Subaru could care less if they lose you forever as a customer. It's a statistics thing. A convert will come along that had a bad experience with a Ford to replace you. It really isn't to anyone's financial benefit except you to spend the effort to find the problem because in the end it will require so many hours to do so that it will far eclipse the value of the car and you won't pay for that so no technician is going to spend the time. It's a bit of a societal problem in general but the ever-increasing complexity, the drive for ever-increasing profit by creating the artificial need to replace products frequently, and the ability to release products while they are still in a software beta state and "online" update them later if and when there's enough complaints is really reaching an intolerable level. At least for me. Basically everything we buy is now total garbage and we have forgotten the two most important of the three R's. Everyone thinks it's all fine as long as it's "Recycled". No one bothers one bit with Reduce or Reuse. Just throw it "away" (where the hell is that exactly?) and get another one. Someone will recycle it.... probably into a landfill or into your lungs via a convenient incinerator. GD