New water pump and thermostat gaskets failed. What now?

Question

For some context, I did these maybe 1k miles ago along with a new water pump, timing belt, front oil seals, radiator, and tstat. Used a flyin Miata kit for the water pump and belt. tstat from rockauto along with a paper gasket. Did a pretty decent job scraping the surfaces clean (I thought, first time) and had everything running leak free until this week.

What I think happened is all 3 gaskets failed during an overheat this week. My fan motor blew while waiting at a construction stop. I noticed pretty quick and was able to get it back down from just a hair past 12 o’clock by turning the AC fan on. Honestly it was so short and minor that I didn’t think much of it. I had a much worse overheat situation a while back when the water pump/alternator belt failed and things were fine afterwards.

The leaks are all definitely new as of the overheat. I popped the timing covers off not too long ago to re-adjust timing belt tension and didn’t see anything.

So my questions are: should I just redo the gaskets and carry on? Is it possible the housings and water pump warped during the overheat? Should I use RTV instead this time? Should I try to grab some OEM gaskets from Mazda vs generic ones from the local auto parts store?

Posted May 8, 2026, 3:46 PM UTC

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