mind bender -- 4" cast iron female hub, lead 4" pipe

[G.B. Cricket]

Hi all,

I'm working on the toilet plumbing that was installed right after the last ice age. :-)

Below the toilet, I had a female cast iron hub with a 4" lead pipe inserted which came up to mate with the horn on the bottom of the toilet. The top of the lead pipe was pretty chewed up and would not make an air tight seal in the event of a stoppage and overflow. I decided to remove the lead pipe from the female cast iron and convert to 4" pvc with a conversion gasket.

I've got the protruding lead pipe cut off but it appears that there is a steel sleeve holding the lead pipe in place in the 4" cast iron female. My recip saw with metal cutting blade won't even put a dent in it. How do I get this #$%^&^^ sleeve out? Perhaps some kinda "dent puller"???

Any suggestions really appreciated.

[Dean Hoffman]

Cutoff wheel on angle grinder???????

[G.B. Cricket]

I'll bet that would work but my angle grinder is too large to fit. Do they rent a smaller angle grinder?

[Dean Hoffman]

Don't know. My thought was that you cut the whole pipe off from the outside then use something like a Dresser coupler to reconnect things.

They look like the stuff above. I'm familiar with them because I worked with irrigation. There could be cheaper options. I didn't spend a lot of time looking.

[gfretwell]

That is solder. A big torch will melt it. If you do grind it, wear a respirator, not your N-0 mask.

[Dean Hoffman]

There are cheaper, PVC versions of the dresser couplers I suggested earlier.

There are some weird things about pipe sizing. The details escape me right now. Metal vs. pvc. I don't have any idea about inspections and such if required.

[Thomas]

Start from the bottom. Ask local fire dept for a quick cut. Replace all. 5 minute job before your job. Been there. Fire dept likes practice if small town. I fernco'd my shit together.

[Todesco]

In my previous house I wanted to use one of those offset flanges on a toilet to move it over 2". Yeah, for 2" I did all this! But, it was a very small 2 piece room and every inch was important. The floor was concrete. I used my router, believe it or not, with a small cut-off wheel attached via an extension. I had to slow the router considerably using an external speed controller ... I think I borrowed a variac from work to do it. Cutting the cast iron wasn't the hard part here. Breaking the concrete was. I had to go out and rent a jack hammer to do it. Sucess!

[G.B. Cricket]

I'm thinking it must be a cast iron ring as my recip saw will not even put a scratch on it. I put a 90 head on my dremel and I was snapping cut- off wheels in a matter of seconds. Still no marks on the sleeve.

The torch comes next. Or maybe I need to follow others that say get a quick cut from the fire dept .....

[G.B. Cricket]

Finally bought a Bauer SDS hammer-drill from harbor freight and a chisel- cut blade. I put the hammer-drill on "hammer only" and brought the chisel blade to position on on top of the insert inside the lead pipe. The insert turned out to be cast iron (about 1/16" thick) and the hammer cracked it out in less than a minute.

At this point, removed the remains of the lead pipe, dug out the cast lead and oakum (that had surrounded the lead pipe) and installed a 4" pvc conversion gasket.

Note: I could not insert the 4" lubricated pvc pipe into the gasket until I finally used a 8 pound dead-blow hammer. A normal hammer simply would not sink the pvc pipe into the gasket.

Thanks everyone for the ideas.