Some days feel like they conspire to thwart my will at every turn.
My entire motto for the month of July is to bare-minimum it through work, rest, and tinker with my outdoor house projects list while weather is fair. As a favor for Doug, I swung by one of his customer’s house to see about a handle that had come off a shower.
Couldn’t be simpler. Literally.
I find the handle, and I find the problem. The screw that held it in broke off at the head. Both parts of the screw were present. Literally the easiest fix, easiest money in the world.
One small problem.
The screw looked really funny. Like…weirdly thin, and with weirdly tight threads.
I put the screw pieces in my pocket and told the homeowner that I could fix it, and would be back shortly to do so.
Plan A: replace the screw
An hour later I had gone over every screw on the hardware store wall and come up with 4 shitty candidates. None of the threads were a match, and none of them were smaller in shaft diameter. Which meant if I was going to use hardware store hardware, I was going to have to force the threads into new threads. Not ideal, and usually only works for a few turns before it binds up completely.
Worst case scenario.
Plan B: repair the old screw
I swung by our shop and got all of my torch and solder tools out. I noticed that the tip of the broken off screw head had a tiny hole down the middle, which meant a solder lug would grab nicely if I could get it into a position that I could hold it steady. I put the head of the screw in my vise just to hold it level while I balanced the rest of the screw straight up on top of it. I like using the vise for things like this because I can blow torch it without worry.
The second the vice grabbed the tiny screw head it crumbled in half.
I looked around for another screw with a head that would work, and found one. Using a hack saw and the same vise, I cut the head off and immediately lost it into the ether.
I found another screw and repeated the process, this time over an empty 5 gallon bucket, and finally I had the head. I cleaned the back of it up, put it GENTLY in the vise, cleaned the tip of the old screw up, and using needle nose pliers and two sets of gloves, I was able to tin both the head of the screw and the shaft tip.
And that was as far as I could manage. I couldn’t get a clean connection between the two. The brass would either de-tin itself, or my shaking hands would break the solder lug while I was trying to hold it steady as it cooled. I tried many times over the course of an hour and eventually gave up.
Plan C: use a screw that was one step smaller in diameter, and wrap it in thread tape so it grabs the off-threads.
After much looking I realized there was no smaller diameter screw than that.
Plan D: force the original off-threaded screws I bought at the hardware store
I went back to the shower in question and tried one of the shorter of the 4 screws I had purchased as a last ditch. It stuck out about a half inch longer than it needed to be, to be tight, and I was able to force it home maybe a quarter of that distance, but then it bound up and started to get stuck. I was barely able to get it back out without completely stripping the head. I noted how much I had to cut off and took one of the fresh bolts I had and a hack saw and cut it to length.
I immediately lost it into the ether of a large tool bag, which I emptied to find.
I went back to put it in finally and be done with it, but lo and behold I cut it too short.
Back to the truck. New screw. Recut with a hack saw, this time over the same five gallon bucket.
Finally worked.
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