As I Try To Make My Way To The Ordinary World

Before reading this post be sure to read the first part here.

After gathering the materials necessary I return home to reconstruct my bathroom sink. I stick the cold water stem into the opening and tighten it up. I then turn the cold water back on. No leaks. Next I open up the cold water faucet. No leaks. Just to be sure I turn the hot water on and then open the faucet. I attempt to open it that is. The porcelain handle breaks. Great! Looks like Ive got a lot of gluing to do.

O ke doke. Might as well take this whole side apart too and put that new part I got on. This side however was not steady. It was loose in the hole. After several different vice grip configurations I finally get to the rubber part that is to be replaced. Unfortunately like the cold water side this one also needs to be loosened to accommodate the new larger part. First I try just a couple pliers, no chance. Perhaps vice grips will work. NO. OK, out to the garage where the big vice is. Put it in there and use the big vice grips on the other side. Still nothing. Frickin awesome. I have to leave for work in 10 min and if the wife comes home to this shes going to freak out. I get the PB Blaster out and spray the shit out of this thing. It sits for a minute and I try to loosen it again. No dice. OK I should beat her home with about an hour to work on this. I spray the shit out of the fixture again and let it sit.

9:00 and Im home again. I have exactly an hour to get this thing fixed. The first thing I do is try to loosen the fixture that has been marinating for 5 hours. Much to my surprise it comes loose on the first try. I havent even officially gotten home and Ive already loosened the fixture. NICE. Next is to go in the house and change out of my work cloths.

Now properly clothed, I put the new part on the hot water faucet stem. Theres still 2 problems though. 1: Both handles are smashed and need to be glued back together. 2: The hot water side is loose. Some times when you turn the handle (when there was a handle) the entire fixture would spin rather than just loosening up. After examining the thing for a while I determined that there werent enough threads for the pretty thing to grab onto on the hot water side. Therefore there was nothing holding it in place and it could move freely.

At this point I realized that you can never have too many big tools. I had every pliers but the big one out and in order to loosen the thing on the bottom to allow more threads to go up I needed one at least that big. Threads now exposed I put the hot water side back together. Everything functions and there are no leaks. Were down to one problem. No handles!

When I asked the good man at Godwin Hardware if he thought super glue would hold these stupid porcelain handles together he kinda smirked. Then he said "we do have some killer adhesives that would work." We go over to the adhesive isle and he grabs the Devcon High Strength 2 Ton Epoxy (All Purpose). This stuff aint your little sisters Krazy Glue. Its stored in a 2 nozzle syringe. One side has the resin and the other has the hardener. Once you squirt them out you have 30 minutes to mix it and get it on. After the 30 minutes is up, its hard. Then after 8 hours its water/fire proof can handle temperatures between -60F and 200F and has a PSI strength of 2500 pounds. NICE. Needles to say I was a little intimidated working with it.

For the most part the epoxy application went uneventful. I still have some stuck to my fingers but most of the skin underneath where the glue was died and fell off with it.

Long ago I vowed to never again do plumbing work. I hate plumbing. Things that would normally be very easy always turn into many houred projects. Ive decided to take up my vow of no plumbing again.