Thanks, Michael.

You know, it is something strange with flanges calculation in US engineering history.
As theory, Taylor-Forge is in fact wrong in a particular point of their demonstration but flanges designed are good enough in real world. I guess this is the root of reticence you've mentioned.

The price is just one century of reticence. Even today we evaluate the stress in flanges with ridiculous low bolt loads, for gasket load we use a formula that appears to be pressure proportional when it is intuitive that the pressure reduces the gasket load... well, is just functioning despite my reticence. For me is something as counting 1+1=11 when we need 5+5=10, but finally we get a good 10% conservative approximation. OK, what to say more?

WRC Bulletin 538 and ASME PCC-1 (which corrected the wrong reference to WRC 528...) are just good tentatives to rejoin the theory with reality. But reticence will make the future, I guess.

In the end, just to stay on topic, the EN method fundamentals are in an old standard of a former German Democratic Republic. Amazing, isn't it?