Revenge of the Return of Son of Larry Lightbulb

Thanks to Larry Lightbulb, who owned this house before I did, things are put together a bit strangely. It all works, more or less, but you never know what you're going to find when you delve into things.

As one silly example: I have a dryer cord on my electric stove and a stove cord on my dryer. They're different designs of heavy duty 220V three-prong plugs; supposedly they're for different amperage. Everything works (although I did have to put a cover on the stove 220V outlet when I replaced the stove; it was sitting around with bare terminals down there) but apparently the good Mr. Lightbulb got a few things backward.

I ran into the spoor of Larry Lightbulb again today.

The other day I did a load of laundry. We're on a septic tank here, and septic tanks don't like polyester fibers. So I have a lint trap on the washer drain hose. It's a small sock made out of coarse nylon mesh. Traps quite an amazing amount of lint.

The old one plugged up, so the washer didn't drain. I put on a new trap, re-spun Load One, put Load Two in the washer, and went away.

I came back to find water all over the floor. Well, I knew what had happened. The washer drain hangs over the side of the laundry tub. I have a ripped-out plastic shopping bag around its outlet to keep it from splashing water all over the place-- when the lint-trap sock fills up, water often exits it sideways. I must have forgotten to get this improptu splash shield back in place when I put the new trap on.

So I got the mop, and ran water in the laundry tub, and started mopping up. Wasn't long before I noticed the water on the floor was getting deeper.

What had really happened was that somewhere along the line I must have bumped the laundry tub, and one of the zinc collars holding the trap segments together had snapped. Shouldn't have, but it's what, forty years old now, and was probably the cheapest available at the time.

So now I had plumbing to do. I mopped up the water, dumped it elsewhere, and waited for things to dry out.

Today, when I got in there, I started to install a neat plastic repair kit. Flexible, so that a bump on the laundry tub shouldn't fracture things any more. It fastens to the drain pipe coming out of the wall, and to the drop line from the sink. Has little pressure fittings, nylon washers. Neat, clean, easy, it installs with no tools-- even the nuts that hold everything together are "wingnut" style, so you don't need a wrench for them.

Only problem being that Mr. Lightbulb used a second piece of thin, chrome-plated brass tubing-- I think it was meant to be another sink drain drop tube-- instead of the cast-iron pipe he should have used, coming out of the wall. And he soldered it in place.

What I SHOULD do is call a plumber. Or whack the tube off with the reciprocating saw-- a very dangerous toy, the reciprocating saw; there should have been some law to prohibit my ever getting one-- and solder a new pipe in place. But of course that's going to take time and cost money. This drain is now open to the septic tank with no trap. It STINKS. I want it fixed now.

Well, because this tube is a drain tube, it will attach to my repair kit without the tubing-to-cast-iron adapter. Everything would line up and fasten together perfectly, except for the flange on the tube that prevents me from putting one of the nylon wingnut coupler things up onto the tube without desoldering it or sawing it-- which is what I'm trying to avoid in the first place.

I tried to wiggle one of the couplers on, and broke it. In the end the broken coupler ring is the only one I can get into place, by fitting it around the wall tube and trying to super-glue it back together.

You ever wonder where the term "haywire" came from? Back in the old days, hay balers used to wrap wire around the hay bales to hold them together. This was bad, because sometimes cattle ate the wire. If the cow didn't have a cow magnet-- a coated magnet forced down the cow's throat; it lodges in the first stomach and accumulates whatever bits of steel the stupid beast manages to swallow-- the wire would get into the cow's intestines, likely puncturing things and killing the cow. So they went over to sisal binder twine after a while. Much safer.

But while hay bales still had wire, farmers used hay wire to repair all sorts of things. A shoddy, run-down farm, where everything was broken and held together by wire, was a haywire outfit. A busted machine tied together with the stuff was haywired.

Thus endeth the lexicography lesson for today.

I've got some modern equivalent of haywire tied around the busted coupling nut, holding it together while the glue dries. In about ten minutes I'm going to go back there and try to couple everything together. And in future years, someone will curse ME as the Larry Lightbulb who put things together in such a haywire fashion. But I don't see much choice.

In the meantime, I've got silicone caulking goo on my fingers. It won't dry and crumble off, it won't wash off, and it feels awful. And I have a sinking feeling that my attempted repair won't work. This, by the way, is the elegant approach; if this fails, I'll probably prove my handyman credentials by smearing silicone caulk on like peanut butter and then wrapping the whole thing in about forty layers of duct tape. I hope I don't have to do that. It's ugly.

"Have a nice day," the clerk at the hardware said. "I doubt it. I'm doing plumbing," I replied.

He laughed.