Yep, teflon tape can fool ya into thinking a tapered fitting isn't tight and that last turn can split the female thread. All of the Rochester 'B' inlets were poorly designed, even though they beefed up the cross section of the air horn a bunch they didn't increase the wall thickness on the inlet boss. I'll bet there are a lot of them out there that have problems in this area.
Thanks for the discription of the tooling for the flairs. I bought a tap a while back for the 1/4" brake lines, the nuts are a 7/16-24 NS. A "national special" botton tap makes it a pretty pricy tap so I was a little reluctant to start grinding on it. Where I used to work the machine shop forman told me to bring it in and he could relieve it in the center with their EDM. I was going to grind a single flute tool from drill rod for the flair but never could find the standards to get the correct dimensions.
Well, one extra fitting and I'm back in business with a nice clean fix.
Thanks again.
Denny Graham
Sandwich, IL
