Here's my DIY tip of the year which I discovered today. It is going to save me from ever again doing what I consider one of the worst DIY chores in the book: changing sink taps! thought I'd share it with you. Those of you who already know it can ignore this!
You know those tap reseating tools? Useless aren't they!? Wrong! In my opinion, they are useless for saving taps whose seats are really badly eroded (which they usually are when it gets to the stage where you can't stop a tap from dripping by tightening down by hand. (Unless you fancy standing there all day, twisting the reseating die). However, they are absolutely brilliant as a tool for avoiding that situation in the first place! Simply use the tool to smooth down the seats of your taps oce a year - BEFORE they start dripping! It only takes a few turns of the die to clean up the seat. You'll see it shining in the light like a ring of polished brass when it's done. That way, I anticipate you can make your taps last probably ten times as long.
If you dno't do this, what happens is that you get a tiny leak going past the neoprene tap washer - maybe caused by a little bit of debris.. this tiny little flow of water, starting off perhaps as narrow as a strand of human hair, starts to erode a gully in the seat of the tap. That little gully gets deeper and deeper until you can eventually feel it with your fingernail, just as though soneone has sawn a little slot in accross the circumference of the seat. By the time it gets this bad, it is usually quciker and simpler just to change the taps rather than try to grind down the seat - at least, if you are using one of those hand-reseating tools.... But everyone knows what a horrible contortionist chore that is! So by following my tip, you can avoid that ordeal perhaps forever more.
Just remember to turn the mains water supply off before you start dismantling your taps!
Comments welcome.
Alan A