On Wed, 12 May 2010 10:50:01 -0700, "Bob La Londe"
wrote:

I was just replacing our dishwasher with a new one, and I noticed
something...

First off let me tell you in the past I have always swapped stuff like this
myself, but when we moved into this house we were just too busy and I didn't
have time to do everything. I let my wife hire a plumber to install the
dishwasher we brought from the old house and move her fancy toilets.

Anyway, I pulled the compression nut off the water supply line and it was
wrapped in pipe dope... over top of teflon tape... AND there was more pipe
dope under the tape. I stripped all that crap off the fitting with a wire
brush and installed it in the new dishwasher. Tape on the tapered pipe
thread into the machine, and nothing on the compression side from the supply
line. Amazingly it work just like it was designed.

Wadda dope!

I scoffed the first time I saw dope on top of tape (tapered pipe
threads). Since then I've screwed together a lot of joints including
quite a few with messed up threads that would only seal with the
verboten combination of tape and dope. My most recent one was on the
oil cooler of a stranded 60's vintage bus. The pipe fitting had been
broken off flush and I could only get it out by slotting it with a die
grinder. Laying on my back with sand blowing and oil dripping in my
eyes while breathing bus exhaust (engine needed to run the
compressor), I couldn't be faulted too much for dinging the female
threads pretty badly. Especially since I'd driven to the middle of
nowhere to work for free. I figured that the best I could do was seal
the joint sufficiently to get the bus rolling while trailing a leak.
But lots of tape and a little dope actually sealed the thing. Not even
a drip.

Wayne