We've always lived in old (for America) houses, so I've picked up a few skills over the years for dealing with 50 and 75-year-old hardware. For one, I kept a book called 'The Handyman's Manual', a kind of proto-Sunset book published around 1955 that had schematics and instructions for all the then-current household hardware. It has stood me in good stead.

But, getting back to toilets, the problem with old ones was not the porcelain, which, I think, lasts forever. The problem is the metal hardware: even if it's brass or copper, it eventually corrodes, and not every previous owner of my abodes had chosen expensive brass and copper. Modern toilets wisely use plastic fittings, which don't corrode.

So it came to be that the nuts and bolts holding the decidedly worn toilet seat in our South Pasadena guest bathroom were rusted tight: indeed it was hard to see what was nut and bolt, so corroded were the fittings. As I'd left it to the night before my mother's arrival, it was do or die: I gouged and filed down the nut, and then applied a mighty wrench about 2 feet long. I tugged, and tugged and finally gave a a huge, all-I've-got heave, with both feet anchored against the wall.

The results were spectacular: the toilet, maybe 75 years old and possessing a vast, and not unattractive mosaic of tiny cracks, shattered suddenly into thousands of shards. A jet of water erupted from the midst of the wreckage, and quickly flooded the bathroom.

Don't ask what the 24-hour emergency plumbers charged to put all right before mother's arrival. Since then, my wife doesn't even flinch when I call a plumber to deal with bathroom plumbing. So, when our small, very-fifties bathroom's toilet began to run constantly recently, it took a bit of convincing to get permission to even look at the problem.

Actually, I had been given leave to repair the ballcock on this toilet once. It cost $11, and still works fine after 5 years. But now, it's the flush valve which is leaking, likely because the 49-year-old rubber gaskets have had it: touching one with a finger results in a burst of rubber debris. A new flapper gizmo doesn't stop the leak.

Our good local plumber charges 500 bucks to replace a toilet: $300 for the toilet, and $200 to put it in. He does a good job, and cleans up afterwards (he's replaced other toilets in our 1954-vintage Menlo Park house). But I noted, after an exploratory trip to Palo Alto Hardware, that the rubber gaskets cost about $2: and replacing all of the moving parts save the porcelain, would cost $16.

So, given that biz is slow just at the moment, and the book is happening slowly, as well, I decided I would fix the toilet. How hard could it be? I figured I would RTFM, take my time, and save $484.

Well, this time, I had learned my lesson about applying massive force to metal fittings on porcelain. It took an hour to strip the toilet down to its elements: the tank, ballcock, joining bolts, lid etc. I even remembered to turn the toilet water valve off.

But there was just one problem: a zinc nut holding the old brass flush valve assembly in place. For one thing, it's on backwards, so the wrench can't grab the flat faces of the nut. For another, the zinc is locked, under 49 years of corrosion onto the brass: a hard, but careful, tug on the nut rotates the whole assembly, with a bad porcelain grinding noise.

So, with dinner guests coming, I ceased work, frozen nut and all. I lathered the nut with a can of penetrating oil my father-in-law had given me: it's a product from the 50s, which judging by the neuron-destroying odor, is probably illegal today, but which has amazing properties for loosening corroded bolts and nuts.

So, we'll see in the morning. Given that we're having a dinner party Thursday, part of a charity deal where friends paid some serious bucks to have a celeb chef whip up dinner here, the pressure is on. $16 or $500... and, no, I don't think I want a network-enabled replacement toilet...
Comments 10:07:05 PM    

Another way for vendors to go would be to start their own blogs - product blogs run by product managers or other knowledgeable people. It would require somebody who 'got it' about blogs, but these could link out to, and be linked back from, the afficianado sites if they did a good job and provided useful and interesting stuff (not just product pitches, though those would be OK). This might be a cheaper, and more effective medium.

Macromedia's Flash MX technologies have a blog, Safari has a blog and OS X once had a developer's blog - all of which are (or were) well-read and much linked to. The key to using blogs for marketing is having a good product, writing and maintaining a decent, useful blog and identifying a few enthusiastic users who also have blogs...
Comments 9:17:05 AM    

Cubes can still fetch $1000 on eBay (try that with a 3-year-old PC) and a number of companies sell them with upgraded processors, RAM and video cards. One German cube-owner has wedged in 2 1GHz G4s, complete with water-cooling system. Check out the blog for cube-ownsers...
Comments 8:33:26 AM    

Chris Gulker's view from Silicon Valley - in words and pictures