Desoto???? Huh! From the angle and the shape of the side, I had thought it was an Avanti.
On the other hand..............I had been going through a serious case of the procrastinations in connection with some work that my shower needed to have done. Nothing serious?!?!?! or requiring major invasive surgery, just the need to pull the tap cartridges and replace them. So today, for no particular reason, became trigger day.
I had actually acquired the replacement cartridges last winter but had not gotten into the exercise beyond that point; too many other things to divert my attention. So I dug them out of where they had been abandoned and proceeded to turn off the water for that circuit, dismount the handles from the cartridges, and use an adjustable wrench to remove them. Did start out by thinking that a 3/4 combi wrench would work for the screwing around; Uh-uh, discovered that I needed a 13/16, and even then, only for the old ones. The new ones........................meh.
With the old cartridges out, time to take a look at the seats. Turned out that they were still in good shape which was a bonus because I have no idea what size of hex key will remove them!!! The new ones use a white man's normal 5/16's, these ????? 5 is too small and 3/8ths too big. Tried metric and that was a bust. Did finally get a long arm key that fit down the throat of the tap pocket and picked up the seat and leaned on the key with the wrench and it did not want to move. Uh-uh, not going down this rabbit hole. Too much lean and I can either damage the seat or damage the casting in which it sits. Either way means that I have to take down the shower wall and dive into the rough in. Nope, not gonna happen. Moving on.
So the new hot side cartridge went in okay as did the cold one. Back downstairs, re-energize the circuit and, why am I hearing high volumes of running water that don't seem to be slowing down? Back upstairs, cold tap is on??? and water is doing its thing. Turn the tap off as I have done umpteen times over the decades and.......................It Ain't Turning OFF. Bag was labelled cold, so why does the cartridge not do cold like the old one did??
Come to find out after some fiddling around that both taps in the shower had "HOT" cartridges in them. Why? Probably because it made things safer when accessing the taps to turn them on as it avoiding having to deal with the hot side and getting scalded or burnt just to deal with the cold side. With both turning in the same direction, you turn the farthest tap on first and then move over the the closer one and there is no need to think about rightly-tightly or left hand thread or other water borne philosophical considerations when you are mostly asleep and working on auto-pilot.
Sorted that lot out and re-assembled the tap handles, tested the system and good to go. The procrastination factor? Well, it took almost an hour and a half to do was supposed to take ten minutes, maybe fifteen, at most? Back brain must have been seriously pounding on me to "why do it now, wait for spring", because it had some racial memory of the job being a time killing nuisance.
Nick
