Mister Adquatewrench
Not long ago, our bathroom sink developed a drip, which soon progressed to a proper leak, and I fixed it. That may not seem like any big deal to you, but I, like Dave Barry, suffer from an absence of what he calls the “Mr. Goodwrench gene.” I am not handy with tools, electronics, modeling kits, or basically any kind of construction or repair work. I blame a lifetime of mathematical abstraction: all my education has presumed arbitrarily strong attachments, an absence of friction, point masses, and other fictions of convenience. There’s a world of difference between an idealized joint that won’t loosen and wobble under stress and a real carpenter’s joint, which will. The only thing a semester of shop class taught me, back in ’82, was to fear power tools; I figured if our shop teacher (who was—no joke—named “Mr. Stump”) could lose a finger to a circular saw, I had no business being near one. So it’s emotionally rewarding when I can fix something properly. It makes me feel manful.
I have a bit of an advantage when it comes to plumbing: while in college, I earned a modest salary as a clerk in the plumbing department of Menard’s hardware. Exposure to the many bits and pieces of a plumber’s trade is nothing like being exposed to plumbing, but I did pick up enough to make educated guesses when the need arises.
But common sense and educated guesses only take you so far. Case in point: the sink under discussion. A drip turning into a leak suggests a bad seal, quite possibly due to a dried, cracked or otherwise damaged gasket. So with considerable effort, I unhooked the faucet from the basin and looked for a way in to where the cold-water gasket would be. To all appearances, this meant removing a large, plastic plate from the bottom of the faucet casing, which in turn required a square bit, which I do not own, because god forbid the manufacturer should employ a Philips-head screw like everyone else on the planet. I trekked down to the neighborhood hardware store, which had no square bits, and had to travel to Home Depot, which did, but only for power drills, which I also do not own. I made do with a pair of pliers, twisting the bit manually. After removing the plate and looking around inside the faucet casing, I eventually concluded one could not get into the guts of the faucet this way. Relying more on logic than mechanics, I eventually determined where a carefully concealed secret compartment could be found, and found it, exposing Philips-head screws that held the taps together. Removing these allowed me to look over the gaskets and mechanisms at the heart of the faucet but revealed nothing: the gasket was whole and flexible, the solid parts showed no wear, and there was no evidence of foreign material lodging where it would interfere with the seal. I dropped by the local hardware store nevertheless, and bought a little box of gaskets as replacements. Reassembling the whole faucet unit, I found it once again worked properly. Knowing now where the secret compartment was, it was easy to put back the original gasket, so I did, and the faucet continued to work properly.
The only problem was that repeated twisting had loosened the screw that held the cold-water tap together. Loosening this broke the seal on the tap. If I’d known what to do from the start, the whole operation wouldn’t have taken me five minutes: open the secret compartment, tighten the screw, close the secret compartment. But I didn’t know what to do from the start, so I only got there in a roundabout fashion, taking five hours, exposing me to Home Depot (which I hate), and costing $9 or so.
I still count it a success. For one thing, $9 is way less than a professional plumber would charge, and, while he might take two minutes to do the job, we’d nonetheless be waiting on him for five hours to arrive and do it. Proving able to do it at all is a victory for a general education and general smarts. This is my third successful plumbing repair, and Eileene, who won’t trust me with other handiwork, has determined that I do basically know what I’m doing when it comes to pipes.