quote Mumbles:
When the parts were new and straight without any corrosion or pitting, it was probably OK for the factory to use a special sealing compound instead of a gasket. Go forward sixty years and those parts probably aren’t as nice as they once were. I find the price of an extra gasket to be cheap insurance for preventing any annoying leaks in this area. You just have to make sure the screws are long enough now to grab the threads in the block good. 😀
Time to order a second gasket. As stated earlier, I was surprised to find that there was no gasket on the exhaust cover side from the factory. It just didn’t make sense to me. "Cheap insurance" does make sense to me. I prefer to fix things just once, (but it doesn’t always work out that way for me). 🙂
