Ace IS The Place
Part of what has been tying me up for a couple of weeks is looking for a replacement for a failed faucet stem in a shower. This stem is probably 50 years old and almost all of the reliable local hardware stores have been killed off when the ‘big boxes’ arrived.
I took all of the measurements and a picture of the part and went on the ‘Net to get a part number. After all of that, I think it’s time for someone to buy some rulers for the people who write the specifications for plumbing parts, because they are not on the same continent as ‘accurate’. Let me just say that no one has ever made a shower faucet stem with an overall length of 55 inches. There are sites who do make an effort by photographing samples on ¼-inch graph paper that are really useful.
As this was an older part, I found it and bought it at ACE Hardware, the small store with an amazing collection of actual hardware.
6 comments
i used to love going to ace hardware stores.
It is a bit out of the way, but it beat the ‘just order it on-line and it will be delivered for free to the store’ which is the only way to get something that doesn’t sell every week at a ‘big box’ or is considered ‘out of season’.
We only have one of the old fashioned Ace Hardware stores left here in the Bay Area, but it’s a big one, up in Fremont. The two that used to be within a short distance of my house have both closed down because rent went too high :(.
I had a similar problem with the hinges on my GE oven. I opened the oven and it slammed down all the way to the floor. Once I learned the trick to taking the door off it was easy to figure out what the problem was — the rivets holding the spring-loaded door retainers to the hinge proper had worn out, worn through, and popped. The solution suggested was to pay $20 apiece for new hinges, which come as one piece and the retainer gets threaded through the slot. $40. For a thirty year old oven. Nuh-uhn. Not happenin’. I went to my junk boxes in the garage and found some small screws and locknuts that would work, put them back together, and reattached the springs to where I thought they should be (was sorta hard to tell, because both the springs and retainers had been flung all the way to the back of the underside of the oven when the rivets let go). Put the door back on and… yep, it works. Good ’nuff for now, anyhow.
You can usually fix old stuff, but the new stuff is so reliant on weird plastic parts that they won’t sell except as part of an assembly, that fixing things is going out of style. It costs four times as much to buy the individual parts of any appliance, as to buy a new one, so repair people can’t make a living.
If you have the room that’s the best way of replacing rivets. Pop-rivets are too soft for that kind of thing.
Well, the original rivets lasted 30 years, so I have to give them that :). The replacement screws are stainless steel dome socket head metric screws, low profile, they came from a kit for upgrading a Japanese motorcycle carburetor with better screws but I ended up selling the motorcycle. The dome head fit in the available space but I was worried about whether the locknut would clear, but it did — barely.
One reason to repair the stove rather than replace it is exactly because it is repairable. I priced a new stove with the exact same features and it’d be around $500 total, but it’d come with the electronic controls rather than the old fashioned mechanical controls. Reading the reviews, the electronic controls last maybe 5-10 years before the circuit boards fry and you have a major repair expense. These mechanical controls have lasted 30 years and work fine (for loose definition of “fine”, the thermostat dial is in no way accurate for example, which is why I use an oven thermometer visible through the door window to set the temperature), so why buy trouble? I dunno, maybe I’m just a neanderthal, but I had the same thought when I bought my washer and dryer. My washer and dryer are an old school Whirlpool (labeled “Frigidaire”) made down in Mexico using the old tooling, with completely mechanical controls. I know these machines will work for the rest of my life (most likely). The ones with electronic controls… not so much.
– Badtux the Luddite Penguin
Around here the electronic controls get taken out by the crappy power on the grid. The real reason for using UPSs for my computer stuff is to filter the power, but close lightning strikes will get around that protection with induction. The air conditioners in the little apartments my Mother manages lose the controller within about three years of being installed.
Things were once built to last for decades, now only for a month or so beyond the warranty.