I have a two-handle washerless Delta faucet in a bathroom sink.
The cold water drips when the handle is "all the way off," but if I move the handle maybe three degrees "on," the dripping stops.
I'm repair-phobic, yes, even for a leaky faucet. I'm wondering if there's a simpler adjustment I could make, short of taking the faucet handle apart, to make the "off" setting for the water really turn it off with no drips.
There's a litle ball with a short stem (captured in the handle with a setscrew) inside. They wear and leak, and need replacement from time to time. They're not difficult to replace, so no need to be phobic.
You're absolutely right - thanks for chiming in!
(How could I have missed it?)
All delta faucets have spring-loaded washers that wear out with use and hence need replacement. When you remove the handle, you will see a (most-likely hand-tightened) nut which you need to unscrew to remove the handle stem. Now you will see the spring-loaded washer which you can fish out using a small screwdriver or the like. Replacement cost: @ $3 for TWO washers (cold and hot sides). Make sure you turn off the water before you embark on the project!
Mine are more cups than washers. Be sure to note whether the open side is up or down and reinstall the same way. Also scrape the crud and buildup off the bottom of the plastic cartridge that presses against the cup. Be sure to use something soft so not to damage it. If you do, you'll need to replace it too-- only a few bucks. If the fixture is real old, might be worth doing a preemptive replacement on the cartridges as long as you're going to take it apart.
When I try to unscrew a pipe connector from a kitchen sink faucet, I can't get enough leverage because a wrench won't fit behind the sink and have room to hold it and turn it. How do people solve this problem? Is there such a thing as a Z-wrench? Very short open-end wrench with long stem at
90 degrees and handle at 90 degrees from end of stem?
Yes, there is such a thing. It's called a basin wrench; any hardware store should have one. See brief tutorial here:
This is at the bottom of a kitchen sink water pipe, where it connects to a pipe that comes up from the floor. There is an adaptor that seems to go over the pipe from the floor and have threads above for a nut which might be for compression.
The pipe to the sink seems to be flared inside the threaded part of that adaptor. The compression nut can be loosened and moved away from the adaptor, riding up the pipe towards the sink, till you let go of it and it falls back down. (I'm just trying to make the picture as clear as possible, so ignore the parts that are too obvious) With that nut up out of the way, the flared pipe won't pull out easily, probably because the pipe is stiff, and/or the flare inside the threaded part is too tight against it.
Keep in mind that the threads are on the outside of the adaptor, and the flare of the pipe from above is on the inside.
There is no obvious way for the adaptor to connect to the pipe below. It looks like it just sits on it like a sleeve, but it won't pull off, nor turn in either direction. There is no obvious solder. As far as I can tell all pipes are copper, but the one to the sink above seems to be tinned or something, and only the flare looks like copper.
I'm afraid of turning anything too hard, because the pipes are small and old, and might break. The floor is a slab foundation, and the pipe coming up through it can't be easily replaced.
I basically want to replace as much of this stuff as possible, because it's old and hard to work with. I want to replace the pipe to the faucet with a flexible pipe with female npt connectors at each end, which comes in a package labeled for the purpose of connecting a kitchen sink faucet. But before I can replace anything, I have to remove the old stuff without damaging anything that can't easily be replaced. And before I can remove it, I have to understand what it is, so I can remove it without any such damage.
It's just a standard compression fitting. The flare is a compression sleeve; the tubing will get compressed slightly and then flare some above and below the sleeve when it's tightened.
The feed tubes are also copper; the "tinned or something" is in all likelihood the chromed style that were so common for years until chrome-plating got to be expensive.
The compression fitting on the supply line may be either threaded or soldered--one would guess there's a high likelihood it is soldered.
All of the parts are readily available so there's no need to worry about saving them particularly (and compression fittings aren't guaranteed to not leak on reuse w/o new compression ring, anyway) so not to worry about trying to save stuff excessively.
The tubing will bend slightly in order to pull it out of the fitting once the compression nut is off--it's tight because the compression nut is compressed into the supply line and the feed line is somewhat stiff as well.
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Whichever your local merchant has in stock...
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snipped-for-privacy@milmac.com (Doug Miller) wrote in news:kbzqk.34887$ snipped-for-privacy@nlpi066.nbdc.sbc.com:
Thanks. That looks like exactly what I need. I'm shopping for one now. I've found these brands. Which is best?
Brasscraft Superior Tool Empire
dpb wrote in news:g8egim$vap$ snipped-for-privacy@aioe.org:
Thanks for the explanation. That makes it much clearer.
Can I re-use the compression threads as a non-compression kind of adaptor? Such as if I put teflon tape on the compression threads, and screw some kind of adaptor onto them, so the water will go through the inside, with nothing compressed?
No.
Compression fitting threads aren't tapered like NPT and are not designed to be leak-tight. The threads do nothing in a compression fitting except apply the force to pull the compression sleeve into the fitting to make the watertight connection.
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Whichever one is *not* made in China.
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