EBMUD set us straight with the main valve, so back to the task at hand.
To replace the toilet shutoff valve, remove the feeder tube that supplies the tank. This one was installed before the dawn of flex hose, so it’s a straight, stiff shot. Oops, that means there’s no way to get it out of the fittings without removing the tank!
Keep in mind that the goal here is merely to replace the rubber stopper in the tank to stop a minor leak, and that we’re way sidetracked by now.
Grunt, skin knuckles, try every wrench on the pegboard, finally succeed. Behind tank, the wall is black. Scrub and clean wall, tank.
Ace Hardware for replacement everything. Ace Lady says at a certain point you may as well replace the whole durn turlet. But I like this one. 1942 original. Much respect to this turlet.
Return and replace shutoff valve. Restore water pressure. It holds!
Replace main gasket. Lower tank into position. Begin cranking down retaining nuts to compress the fat main gasket. A little here, a little there. A little more here, a little more there. CRACK the day is shot as toilet bowl shatters from pressure (I wasn’t giving it much, must have been ready to go). Well, not shot — I did fix the shutoff valve — but now we have to replace the toilet.
Anyone who thinks I’m complaining about home ownership is off their rocker. I’m in heaven. I feel whole. Computers suck the life out of you.
“Computers suck the life out of you.”
Could you elaborate? Or are you being ironic?
I think he’s being as un-ironic as a person can be. If you don’t feel the life being sucked out of you by computers, you either don’t work with them all day or you’re some kind of a weird human/machine hybrid manufactured in the future.
I believe that different things suck the life out of different people. Fixing stuff around the house sucks the life out of me. And for my sig other computers give him life.
Two words:
“Torque wrench.”
Yeah, I don’t think a torque wrench would have helped here. I really wasn’t even at the point yet of having enough torque to matter. I think it was really just ready to go. 60 years of strain on the porcelain.
You probably don’t need to know this now, but for next time… loosen the compression nut holding the feeder tube to the shutoff valve, let it slide down the tube, then loosen the nut holding the valve in the tank and let that slide down the tube. Now pull… (and maybe a twist to break it loose) the valve comes out in one motion. No need to move the tank. I have found that a good dusting, followed by a pillow for the head and a flashlight often yield a better perspective. Soon as your kid is old enough to hold a wrench, let him tackle the mechanical stuff. If he’s figured out keys, he’s well on his way!
An obscure path, which I won’t explain, brought me here. Blogging is a pleasure I have not sampled…
Unless you did this for some reason of your own, as mystical techies do… “foobar” is actually “fubar” which is an acronym of military origin “fucked up beyond all repair” or “fucked up beyond all recognition”
Of course if you intended the cross-reference to our favorite “foo”… then excuse the intrusion.
Eve, foobar in programming is actually not connected to the military acronym fubar. Rather, foo and bar are random, stand-for-anything variables. See:
http://info.astrian.net/jargon/terms/f/foo.html
for detailed discussion.