Sunday is "D(rain)-Day" -- and trap's offset is wrong.

[nukeman]

Try Harbor Freight for a cheap torque wrench. If the adjusters were placed so the a socket wrench would be hoizontal to the floor, a 5lb weight on the end of a 12" long wrench would give 60 in-lb.

[miamicanes]

Hmmm. I just had another idea at Home Depot.

Can I use a compression-nut fitting (like the ones used to join the overflow and tailpipe to the drain's Tee-fitting) to connect the P-trap to the drainpipe projecting from the slab in lieu of the mission coupling? Or is that [a bad idea | likely to be a code violation] ?

What I have in mind is to firmly attach the adapter to the drainpipe, then glue the trap together and glue it to the adapter. The general idea being that if I ever need to redo it someday, I can cut off the trap, then nondestructively unscrew the nut holding it on to the drainpipe.

Assuming it's not bad or illegal, would it likely be a better or worse solution than the mission coupling?

[miamicanes]

^^^ Oops. Two new discoveries...

1. Contrary to what I believed an hour ago, the mission coupling did NOT slip and loosen during installation of the tub drain. It was, in fact, fully covering the drainpipe right up to the rubber separator in the middle.

2. The drainpipe coming from the slab won't actually FIT into the hole in the adapter's nut.

#2 was a disappointment, but #1 worries me. A lot. I apparently DID have both the drain's Tee and the drainpipe fully-inserted into the mission coupling, and I had both screws seemingly tight. Yet, it still leaked. It didn't gush or anything, but one week of daily baths, and the ceiling below would absolutely be damaged. Until I figure out why it was leaking, and how to reinstall it so it doesn't, I'm kind of at an impasse :-(

[miamicanes]

Update: it looks like the problem was that I didn't tighten the bands on the coupling enough. Today after work, I bought a 60lb-in torque driver from Lowe's (~$10) and reassembled everything the way I had it on Sunday. This time, after filling the tub with about 20 gallons of water and draining it, I didn't see any water. Yay!

So, it looks like my next step is going to be getting the shower working & plastic temporarily hung so I can finally start living like a civilized person again. I have to admit, though, that it's going to be *at least* a week or two, and a few hundred-gallon+ drainings devoid of visible leakage, before I'm really going to start feeling like I can trust it and start making plans to build the new front panel to close it off.

For what it's worth, the torque driver tightened the bands *at least* 3-5 notches beyond what I dared to do on Sunday.

Note to anyone who sees this in the future and wants to buy a torque driver from Lowe's: they aren't in the tool department, and they aren't in the PLUMBING tool section... they're in a bin next to the union couplings. Handy, I guess, if you know you'll need one and are shopping for a coupling, but frustrating as hell to find if you're naive enough to think they'll actually be in the *tool* department. I actually had to look up the part number using my phone (Sprint Hero... Android rocks) so the employee could find them. He knew they had them somewhere, but was as stumped as I was about where exactly that might be.

[miamicanes]

Update II -- the shower/tub mixer, head, and filler are all in place, and seem to be drip-free and watertight.

The anticlimax: seeing 4 streams of water coming from the filler that didn't really look like all that much water. Intellectually, I know it's the full capacity of 1/2" pipe and is probably the same amount the old tub used to deliver, and it's probably just an optical illusion caused by the fact that the NEW filler is so huge compared to the old one that it just "looks" like it should blast a firehose-like torrent of water... but still, it was kind of a disappointment.

The bad news: while filling the tub to test it (and blasting water directly at the top of the overflow drain due to my "too-short filler spout" problem), I noticed a tiny bit of dripping water. No gushing or anything, but there was a definite, visible trail leading from the bottom rear of the overflow drain's hole to the point where the tub's underside curved enough for it to slowly drip onto the floor. It looks like the basic problem is that the rear/underside of the tub isn't perfectly smooth... it's fiberglass, with tiny little ridges. It looks like the water is finding its way through one of them.

Any ideas what I can do to eliminate that? Right now, it's just PVC -> black foam ring -> hole in bathtub -> metal bracket with screw in the middle holding the whole thing together. I can't tighten it any more... the instructions said to only make it "hand tight, plus 1/4 turn". Do I maybe need to apply something to the rough fiberglass side of the tub to make it smooth so I'll get a better seal? Or should I just keep tightening it 1/4 turn at a time whenever I see a drip?