shower valve body in 35 year old home

[nobody]

Hi All,

I had a plumbing service call in a 35 year old home. I opened the access panel and observed the brand name cast into the valve -- it was a first quality name. Since I was dealing with a first quality brand, I decided to rebuild rather than replace.

I wrenched open the valve thru the valve stems. Surprisingly, the seats were made of stainless steel. Running my fingernail over the seat revealed no groves whatsoever. I installed some new dirt-cheap rubber seals and the valve sealed like it was brand new.

My friends.....many of today's failures are failures by design. We have the means to make better products but somehow the corporations running the show think a continuous money stream is more important than reliability.

Just a word to the wise.....is this what you want? Is this what you support?

[tim]

I was impressed by a tv show a few years back on Swedish home construction. They used heavy walled stainless water lines. The floors were made of numerous 2x4s glued together as one solid unit and other things. It was a small house next to rail road tracks but it cost over a million dollars, at that time. That was said to be something along the lines of average.

[jim]

Yes things were better built then but most of us want cheaper so we get less , I still like pressure balancing which most taps today are.

[Mamba]

An appropriate posting, as I just read a thread bashing home depot. We live in a country (forgive my ethnocentric assumption) where we worship a cheap price tag and bitch about poor quality products, customer service and moving jobs offshore.

Price, quality, service. Pick any two.

[SteveB]

Do we have a choice? What are our options? Where do we complain?

I had the same experience about six months ago. Made me appreciate the "old" craftsmanship and quality.

But you can live in the past or the present. And one can still live in the present and appreciate the past.

It's called knowing your own values. Something that many people today are clueless about.

Steve

[George]

Unfortunately a lot of people have bought into the idea popularized by walmart that the only thing that should ever be considered is a cheap price.

[N8N]

The problem that i've found is that the "big box" stores are the only ones accessable to the average consumer - e.g. where I live there is a large plumbing specialty store that is only open during banker's hours, making them accessable only to contractors or people who don't have 8-5 jobs.

I'm fortunate that I just discovered another plumbing supplier that is open "after hours" - I'll be stopping there tomorrow to pick up parts to redo my kitchen sink drain.

The second part of the problem is that the "big boxes" ONLY sell cheaply made crap, because they don't consider it worthwhile to sell top-line products...

That said, I did just pick up a kitchen sink drain assembly at the "real" store yesterday - it's shorter than the original which is why I have to go back, but the stopper instead of being a molded rubber plug is a machined piece of metal with an O-ring for a seal. So when it fails 10-15 years from now, I simply pick out the O-ring and buy another (assuming I don't have one in the garage.) I assume that that's the kind of thing that the OP was talking about... Of course it is still stamped "TAIWAN" :(

nate