Old House Plumbing

Hi all.
Great site. I learn a lot just from reaqding all your comments. Here is a question for you on a house built in 1910. While in the middle of removing the massive concrete mud bed from my second floor 6x10 bathroom (re-tiling the floor), my pounding produced a leak from a trap that is connected to my shower pan. I was being careful but I suspected this would happen anyway as the bonds around the trap look like some kind of silver epoxy/solder over paper. Very odd. What is this? You can see them as big silver blobs on the piping photos. Anyway, the trap now leaks at one of these bonds and I'm guessing I can't just reflow this to seal it. The leak trashed a large section of the ceiling in my living room right under the trap. In the big scheme of things, I'm not so unhappy because my bigger fear was cracking the secondary mud be under the shower floor - which did not happen. So, should I just yank out all this old piping stuff and replace, or can these type of bonds be re-sealed? See my photos. Photo 1 is a picture from under the bathroom in my new living room skylight. Trap on the right, red shower pan on the left. Photo 2 is a picture of the trap from inside the bathroom. Photo 3 is the run from the trap to the stack. Not sure the slope down is correct here.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

What you have there is lead piping, and a lead trap, and each joint where it looks like a glob, that is what we call a wiped joint. Its a lost art, that very very few may know how to still do it. Back in the day plumbers made their own pipes and traps out of lead. What people do now is cut out all the lead and replace it with PVC.

P-Trap Cleanout

Hey, thanks SewerRatz for the speedy input! One last question - Does this p-trap really need a clean out on top like this? Since the trap is not right under the shower pan, I understand it would be a bit difficult to clear if it ever really clogged. But is this a code issue? As you can see, the old one was somewhat obvious right in my tile floor. I could also see if I could put the trap right under the shower drain.

Thanks for all your help!

Thats not a P-trap its a drum style trap, could also be an old Atlas trap, hard to tell with out seeing the inside of the trap. Which both need to have clean out access on them for ease of cleaning them out and ease of rodding the drain. Now when you cut all the old pipe out you have two choices install another drum trap, or install a p-trap under the shower pan.

Vent line?

Thanks again.
I would rather tear it all out, as I generally don't try to "repair" anything in this house. Since I will put a p-trap in under the shower pan, what would I do with the existing vent line that is coming out just past the drum trap? You can see it in one of my photos perpendicualr to the waste line - to the right of the trap. It looks like its about the same diameter as the waste pipe. Can this be simply teed in the same position into the 2" PVC run to the stack? The vent line would then be about 2 feet from the actual drain p-trap. I guess I could just re-route the vent to any position if necessary.

You can put it back in where they have it. It just can not be any further than 5 feet from the trap.