Piggin Homobase

[The Medway Handyman]

On Saturday I had to fit a new drop valve to a cistern for a customer - a job I have done many, many times.

As a matter of course I always change the rubber donut connector between the cistern & WC pan.

I don't usually shop at Homobase because the prices are excessive, but in this instance it was the nearest store.

A simple rubber donut connector wasn't available, only a kit containing the donut, a new flange, nuts, bolts & washers. I had no alternative but to spend £5.49 on the kit, whereas a donut usually costs less than £1.

I fitted the drop valve, new kit, re assembled the cistern & WC, tightened the wing nuts as far as they would go - it leaked like the proverbial sieve.

Took it apart, checked the alignment, re assembled, tightened wing nuts - still leaked.

Took it apart again, applied Plumbers Mait. re assembled, tightened wing nuts again - still leaked.

I finally twigged. I should have spotted it earlier given my experience. The solution was amazingly simple.

The bolts supplied in the kit were only partially threaded.

In other words, when tightened fully, to the point where they meet the unthreaded portion of the bolt, they are totally unable to fully compress the rubber donut.

Should have spotted it earlier, but you assume things.

I cleaned up the old (fully threaded) bolts & reused them, not a single drip.

However, not only did I have to spend £5.49 to obtain a rubber donut I could have bought elsewhere for less than £1, I had to spend and extra one & a half hours of my valuable time trying to fit a kit that could not possibly have ever done the job.

Sent Homobase a snottogram asking for a) withdrawal of the kit & b) compo.

Don't suppose either will happen.

[Tim S]

The Medway Handyman coughed up some electrons that declared:

I do wonder if anyone ever tries the products they design:

1) 13A extension reel, 3 sockets perfectly aligned with the 3 bumps that you use to wind it up. 3 bumps prevent any plug going in without bending the cord and totally prevent "funny" plugs - eg RCD plugs and certain wall warts. Adding a 30 degree offset would have fixed this.

2) Hager CU (this is very minor, but from an excellent company): Stick the Earth and Neutral bars on the far right of the metal CU so that half the neutrals dangle in front of the meter tails and are as far away from the cable inlets as possible. OK - this is a simple matter of re-clipping the bars further left, but it rather ruined their attempt to print nice little labels on the bar mount with the way numbers - wasted a bit of time trying to print new labels off a label printer, getting the spacing right.

3) ALDI wall chaser - otherwise quite competent - but let's stick the laser so that it follows the direction of travel ???!!

Cheers

Tim

[Andy Cap]

Not being funny, but surely the thing never tightened up did it ?

Andy C

[The Medway Handyman]

Felt like it did, couldn't see the donut because of a lip around the botom of the cistern, designed to conceal the join. Cistern didn't wobble about though.

[Jon Fairbairn]

I had cause to wonder whether the people who design some of this stuff have the relevant qualifications. I'd been wondering why the loo handle was so badly corroded, and eventually had to take it apart because the arm wasn't moving when the handle was pressed. It turned out that what I thought was plated steel or brass was aluminium (plated on the handle part only), and the arm and U-shaped piece that held it on were brass.

Gah. One of the earliest things I remember from metalwork was "don't use brass and aluminium together, especially not in the wet".

[NT]

which is precisely why they used it, so joe bloggs will come buy another in a few years time. And another.

NT

[PeterC]

That's the worst case, when it feels and looks OK but isn't quite. If the threaded part had been a bit shorter it would have been obvious; a bit longer and it might have sealed temporarily then leaked after a few flushes.

[Stuart Noble]

The moral is, stay away from kits, even if you're tempted by a new set of shiny bolts and plates. In my son's case the new plates were slightly ribbed, which lifted the cistern just enough so that the screw holes into the wall no longer lined up

[Steve Walker]

Certain cheap metal valve caps for car tyres are aluminium (uncoated on the inside) you can imagine the hassle when they spend a few weeks on brass valves in the winter.

SteveW

[PeterC]

I've used brass nipples in ally rims in the Winter but greased them when building the wheel. There's some corrosion after a few years but they come out. Ally and steel though...

[Steve Walker]

It's the actual caps on the brass thread of the valve that was my problem. I put five of them on my kit-car and four on my tintop. I finally managed to remove one of the kit-car ones with a dremel, three by alternately heating and cooling (and replacing the valve cores afterwards) and one by having the valve replaced. The tintop needed new tyres anyway - I forgot to say anything to the garage and they tried repeatedly (and failed) to remove any of the caps.

My mistake in the first place was in using cheap ones, as the better ones have a brass internal thread. I only bought them as cheap replacements after I had the ones on the kit-car stolen and lost the others when then rolled off the bonnet while checking the tyre pressures at a petrol station one dark night.

SteveW

[Jon Fairbairn]

Perhaps. I tend towards "assume incompetence rather than malice", but you may be right. In either case, I keep wondering what could be done to help; I would never have bought such a thing, it came with my house, so I have to replace it, so I'd rather people didn't buy such shoddy stuff in the first place. One could legislate for stronger British Standard markings, but then it struck me that that's the wrong way about. What we should legislate is that things that *don't* meet minimal standards of quality should display a label like this

(If anyone feels like doing a bit of guerilla labelling, there's a scaleable version here . Print it on some sticky labels and stick them on anything for sale that offends your idea of quality)

[Owain]

That would be a non-British Standard Shitemark, then?

Owain

[Tim S]

Jon Fairbairn wibbled:

Nice one. Or perhaps a variant: "Made for chavs by chavs!"

Can we tattoo it on the foreheads of crap tradesmen too?

[Ian White]

Or indeed both: it was probably incompetence in the first place; but if they then decided to do nothing about it, that's malice.

[Jon Fairbairn]

Aha. Do you think the sticker would be better if I added this? ?

[Jules]

TBH I'm leaning toward the idea that the average person simply has no way of assessing how long a product will last (or can be kept going via repairs) - partly because of technological complexity, and partly due to failure in the education system. If they can't make a judgement as to how good something is, what incentive is there for them to buy a more expensive* product over a cheaper one?

• and I have seen expensive products which still fall apart extremely quickly; there's not necessarily a replationship between price and quality.

The unfortunate consequence of all of this is that people start buying cheap crud, so the folk making the good stuff get squeezed out of business, resulting in people _only_ able to buy cheap crud. Of course, it takes a while to build a reputation for quality, so once the companies making the genuinely good stuff have gone it's extremely hard for them (or an equivalent) to come back...

I think I'll slap a few on the doors of Wal-mart next time I'm passing, which should generally cover things - UK folk might like to do the same with Tesco...

cheers

Jules

[Jon Fairbairn]

It finally sheared off.

The handle is supposed to turn within the threaded plastic part...

I suspect that most of the corrosion that can be seen in the picture is due to galvanic corrosion between the chrome plate and the aluminium beneath, rather than between the brass part (which was inside the cistern) and the aluminium bar.

[Jules]

Is it even aluminium? I'm sure I encountered one once which was badly pitted all the way along the shaft, suggesting it was something more like Mazak - bleh.

[Andy Champ]

As far as I can tell, Mazak are a machine tool manufacturer - not a material. WTH?

Andy