Does anyone here have tools purchased for one particular job that are in all likelihood useless for any other job and thus may well be consigned to gathering dust for time and all eternity?
Cuz we do.
A few years back one of our showers was dripping. It got to the point where torquing down way hard on the valve handles helped, but couldn't stop the dripping entirely. I was worried as hell, having many years before seeing some how-to show where a plumber had replaced a valve assembly for a tub-shower combo. The job involved busting through tile, sawing out part of the wall, cutting out the old assembly with a goddamn torch (after packing the whole area with fireproof material so you don't accidentally START A FUCKING FIRE INSIDE THE WALL), soldering a new valve assembly onto the pipes and (after checking for leaks) rebuilding the busted wall and tile. Fuck that noise. I had neither the skill to do any of that nor the ability or inclination to learn.
But I figured, hey, it won't cost anything to take apart what I can and at least look at what we're up against. So I took off the Hot and Cold handles and took a look. The next step in the dismantling process would be unscrewing the packing
1 nut, which, oddly enough, is the nut that holds the valve packing material in place. Trouble is, you couldn't get to the motherfuckers. They're inside the wall, and the hole through the tile and plywood was just barely as wide as it absolutely needed to be. You couldn't get at the packing nuts with ordinary wrenches, sockets, pliers, channel locks or any of that shit.
So off to Home Depot I went, where I found and purchased a set of internal wrenches. Basically, they're sockets that fit through the tiny holes described above and have really, really deep wells for to accommodate the valve stem.
The internal wrenches worked like a charm. The packing nuts came off easily. After that it was a simple matter of unscrewing the valve stem and removing it. At the end of each valve stem was a small beveled washer. Ours weren't beveled any more on accouta they'd been smashed to hell from decades of use. I replaced the washers and everything was fine.
For a while.
Slowly the dripping returned, so I recently decided to replace the washers again. The repair worked for all of a day. There was clearly something else amiss inside the cold water valve assembly.
The Internet told me that the valve seat -- the small circular opening where the washer sits when the valve is closed -- might be worn. Okay, fine, but how do you fix it? It's not like you can get a file all the way down into that little hole to smooth out any imperfections on the valve seat or anything.
And that's where the valve reseating tool comes in. It's a specialty item designed especially for this job. Found one at Home Depot, used it to grind on the seat of our cold water valve, installed a new washer and thus far the operation seems to have succeeded.
So now we have two tools -- a
valve reseater and a set of
internal wrenches -- that I hope never to use again. I suspect some of y'all have similar shit lying around your homes.
Let this here thrad serve as a catalogue of the single-purpose tools owned by
ers. Instead of going out and spending our completely unearned welfare checks on tools we may never use again, perhaps we can find an economically feasible way of sending the stuff we already have to other
ers on an as-needed basis.
You know, like the socialist moonbat leftie whackadoos we are.
1 lol "packing"