Rants from the Hollow

I’ve just written the following email to several suppliers of plumbing equipment:

SUBJECT: My toilet doesn’t have a flat rim, resulting in broken seat hinges

I’m having difficulty finding a suitable replacement seat for a toilet marked ‘Savoy.’

After the hinges broke on several replacement toilet seats, I took a good hard look at my toilet. It turns out that the rim is not flat, which means that all of the weight of the occupant is falling on the front two bumpers, and the hinges. There is ¼” of space between the bottom of the back bumpers, and the toilet rim.

No wonder the hinges keep breaking-they are not meant to be weight bearing.

Is my toilet defective, or is there some sort of special curved seat that I need to buy (comfort factor?). What do you recommend I do, replace the toilet, find a special seat, or is there a high-adjusting hinge?

Thank you, Jay Heiser

I don’t think that we are especially hard on our toilet seats, but we have been replacing them at an unacceptably high rate.

I need to explain that toilet seats, like so much else in England, are special here. Apparently, nobody established a single standard for the width between the hole centers where the seats mount. The solution, at least whatever you can buy at a DIY store, the local ironmonger or online, is a one-size fits all seat that is very fiddly. The need to accommodate variations in mounting hole centers necessitates a kludgey adjustable design for the hinge flanges. As can be seen in this site, replacing a toilet seat in this country is not a routine matter: http://www.ultimatehandyman.co.uk/FITTING_A_TOILET_SEAT.htm

As shown on this photo (after the first couple broken seats, I began saving the parts for future use), The hinge post is screwed into the top of the mounting flange with a simple machine screw. Loosening the screw allows the mount to rotate, changing the relative position of two holes. Its your choice which of these two mounting points you use for a threaded rod that is inserted through the toilet and tightened underneath with a nylon wing nut. This means that there are two cheap machine screw threads inside the mounting assembly to loosen up, which they do with regularity. Having already spent too much time fiddling with these in our last English house, I had already started using Loctite.

Hinge looseness is contributory, but alone, it does not explain the high failure rate of toilet seat hinges in the master bath. I originally thought it was a quality problem. The seat I bought at the DIY store broke, and we needed a quick fix for a guest, so we bought what was available at our local ironmonger. I nice husband and wife run the place, but they both gave me a nasty look when I suggested that their thin plastic £30 seat didn’t seem especially sturdy. Apparently, you aren’t meant to sit on top of the lid, because this one broke very quickly. As shown at the top of the page, Elizabeth tried to make the best of it, but we bought yet another seat before my parents arrived for Kirk’s graduation. (She heard on a radio show that an open toilet flings fecal matter a distance of one meter, so we prefer a seat with a lid).

Now that I’ve figured out the problem, and realize that any plumber or DIY store will treat me like an oaf if I try to explain it to them, I’ve decided that the only solution is, once again, Powerputty. I pulled the two rear bumpers from the toilet seat, kneaded up a couple balls of epoxy putty, stuck them onto the base of the bumpers, stuck them back onto the bottom of the toilet seat, and then pushed the seat firmly down. I fiddled with them joint between the seat and the bumpers a bit, but it is neither an aesthetic nor a hygienic masterpiece. However, in use, all 4 bumpers are now firmly resting on top of the warped toilet rim.

I never feel comfortable as a buyer at one of these things, let alone as a merchant. I know everybody else is looking at me thinking “Crikey! ‘E ain’t go’ any tattoos on ‘im!” The Sunday morning Ascot car boot sale definitely attracts a crowd of people who for the most part are a lot more interesting to look at than me. Its a never ending stream of burkas, uniquely out of style eastern European shirts, strange hats, preggers in tight body shirts, elves, trolls, and the ubiquitous track suit.

Kirk has always loved the car boot sale in Ascot. Whatever particular hobby he’s been into at the time, he’s had a knack for finding something to fit it. LPs, plastic model airplanes, whatever. Now that he’s heading back to college in the states, its time to give back, so he and his friend Ed took two carloads of junk up to the car boot sale when it opened at 6am today. Lots of the stuff wasn’t really junk when it was new, but it is now. Kirk couldn’t give away a TV set or a very nice 1997 computer monitor at £5 each.

Expensive souvenirs collected across an entire hemisphere, I don’t even want to think about how much that stuff all cost when it was new,. It amounted to hundreds of dollars of unused and barely used Christmas stocking stuffers. How many weeks of work went into buying all that pitiful stuff sitting out in the drizzle?

It was a struggle to sell a cordless drill for £8. I was impressed when Kirk adroitly fended off some Polish guy who tried to get it for £5, claiming that it only had one battery.

I was surprised that nobody bought any of Kirk’s LPs, although the Alice Cooper album got some comments. I would never have thought to bring along a half spool of blue-enameled wire, but somebody paid 50p for it, so what do I know.

Ed’s mom’s spikey pumps attracted a number of nibbles before someone finally got hooked. I couldn’t answer the question “What size are these,” and I resisted the urge to say “I don’t know, but you’re about two stone more than the woman who no longer wants them.” I eventually sold 3 pair of totally impractical shoes for a total of £8 to a woman who was not as petite as Ed’s mom, but I’ll give her credit for sitting in one of our folding chairs until she was eventually able to cram her feet into all six of them. It wasn’t just our shoes that were getting a workout. There were some very tight spike-heeled boots across the way, and I watched a large-boned twenty-something unsuccessfully try to squeeze into them, but she couldn’t zip them around her calves. This is when I had my literary moment: Cinderella’s sisters! If your feet fit into small shoes, someone gives you nice clothes, bling, wheels, and a prince. La Fontaine was onto something profound about female sartorial behavior.

With hundreds of sellers and thousands of shoppers, how much of that stuff was making repeat appearances at the sale. Do you suppose some of it just goes around and around, from buyer to seller to buyer? “I’m tired of the orange shag cover on the loo, let’s sell it and see if we can get something in purple.” For example, the people in the car next to us had a Laurel & Hardy statue. Here’s a picture I took last September. I was going to take a picture of this years, and compare them, but somebody bought it. I’ll have to catch it again next year.