Down Where It's Wetter

Contrary to what you might have heard in a song long ago, life is not much better down where it's wetter, as my bathroom vanity was not built to live under the sea.

But we don't always get to choose how we live, and so the moist life was thrust upon this poor, unsuspecting cabinetry.

Remember in a previous post where I said that whenever you see one of these accordion pipes under a sink, you know an idiot was the last person who touched it? Well, I now get to reap the mess they sewed.

Basically, this problem all started because of the first little section of pipe sticking out of the wall. It's a 6 inch galvanized steel nipple. Setting aside the fact that galvanized steel is basically the worst barely-passable material to construct a drain out of, particularly a horizontal run where water will tend to sit (and thus rust it out), this particular pipe section is way too long.

So after this also-awkwardly-long ABS 1-1/2 male NPT to 1-1/2 female NPT adapter was added, the trap ended up sticking out a good inch or two past the tailpiece of the drain.

Which lead to this.

Yeah, water is not going to stay on the inside of that.

The threads on the cast iron fitting in the wall were gunked up and rusted to high heaven, so I needed to deal with that. A regular HSS 1-1/2 NPT tap is not a cheap thing to obtain, given how much high quality steel it takes to make one, but luckily you can get much cheaper carbon steel taps which, while not appropriate for cutting new threads in metal, are perfectly fine for chewing the rust out of old threads.

It is also highly effective when wielded as a weapon in hand-to-hand combat.

Luckily I didn't need to test out that half of it's capabilities, and instead just put its thread-cleaning functions to work.

Right, in you go. Thankfully a tap like this is stout enough that you can just crank on it with an adjustable wrench, which is nice because you don't usually have room to swing a standard tap handle under a sink, and certainly not one large enough to fit onto a tap like this.

You don't want to go too far with a tap like this, since it's tapered and you don't want to make the hole too big. You just want to go far enough to get back to clean metal and not rusted crap.

That'll do, tap, that'll do.

So, it's out with the steel and in with the plastic. Much, much shorter plastic. I also took the opportunity to size down to 1-1/4 since that's the usual standard for bathroom sinks.

Unfortunately the stubby length meant the fitting was too close to the wall for the escutcheon plate to fit on, so into the bin that goes.

Which is fine, considering that it wasn't properly covering the sloppily cut hole in the first place. Also it's inside the vanity, so who's even looking in there?

The important thing is all the new parts are in place and work perfectly, and none of them are made out of that stupid accordion-flex-pipe crap.

Of course, there's still a hole in the wall, so...

On with the hot mud. This stuff is a miracle of modern science: you just mix it up with water, slap it on as thick as you like, and 20 minutes later it's hardened up. Not like the pre-mix where you have to put on a super thin coat, wait days for it to dry, then apply another super thin coat, etc etc until the patch is complete.

With the first coat on, we apply the tape and second coat.

And quite frankly that's good enough for me. There's a tiny little area where it's a bit thin over the tape, but the hole is filled, the wall is basically smooth, and I'm not even going to bother painting it, never mind trying to match the wall texture.

It's done, it's dry, and as a bonus I even get a little more space under there to fill up with the usual under-sink crap.