I just bought an American Standard Cadet 3 toilet. After bolting the tank down to the bowl and tightening it as much as I feel comfortable doing, the tank is very wobbly on top of the bowl. The rubber gasket between the tank and bowl is pretty thick (1 inch) and spongy. The instructions seem to indicate that the tank and bowl should actually be touching porcelain to porcelain. Obviously I don't want to crack anything by over-tightening, but I don't think there's any way the tank should wobble like this. None of my other toilets do that.
Should I just keep carefully tightening until the tank and bowl barely touch? Does anyone have any experience with this toilet or any other advice?
Same model toilet - same problem. I just kept tightening until it felt solid. Figured it would either seat or break and either was better than the tank wobbling around. Your mileage may vary. Tighten both bolts evenly and wear safety glasses.
Good choice, though. I'm very happy with mine.
Thanks for the advice. I used the tool provided with the tank to tighten the screws. I alternated between them and tightened a little (less than one full turn) each time while my wife pushed down on the side that I was tightening. Worked pretty well until I got about 1/16" of space between the tank and bowl. At that point became too hard to turn the tool by hand. The tank was pretty firm on the bowl at the point (though there is still a little play) so I decided not to use a socket wrench to further tighten the tank down. I may go ahead and finish it later. It will depend on whether my fear of cracking something overrides my need to get rid of the wobble. It's anxiety vs. neurosis at this point.
One thing that gave me problems was that the large center whole in the tank (the one through which the water flows) is not a very perfect circle. It's more of an ellipse. This caused the threaded plastic tube that sticks out through that hole (the one on which the spud washer sits) to be offset slightly to one side. This in turn caused the tank not to align properly on the bowl which made it hard to bolt down one side of the tank. I had to unscrew and reset that plastic tube a few times to try to get it centered. People seem to like this toilet in general, but I've noticed a number of problems like this. It seems that the quality control department at American Standard just isn't doing its job. Lots of people reported bowls that wouldn't sit level on the floor. Mine was like that and I had to use lots of shims to get it even close to stable. On the plus side, the toilet does use an impressively small amount of water when flushing. We'll see how well it uses it.
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