No solder required

This is the pipe joint that caused all the trouble. See that bright, silver ring nut? That's the slip joint that I just put on to hopefully stop the leak (too late to test tonight, I'll test it tomorrow). As I was twisting the pipe around last night I busted the series of PVC segments that connect to that hanging brass pipe. I decided to rebuild the entire "PVC stack" that connects to the near-horizontal 2 inch drain line. Maybe it's just as well—it seems that a lot of the original plumbers' work can be done a bit better even though I am not a plumber. Mainly they just seemed to cheap out on some of the materials. In some places they used schedule 10 PVC (on the main water line!) instead of schedule 40. In some places it looks like they didn't prep with the purple cleaner stuff or just didn't use enough PVC cement. Same thing with the copper lines. When we first moved in there were about 3 or 4 leaks in the copper joints. So redoing the "PVC stack" may end being a good thing, if only I can manage to glue it all up correctly.

So first a little bit of PVC sawing, sanding, and dry fitting. Dry PVC is actually kinda hard to twist and turn. I wish there was a temporary lubricant that one could use to dry fit the pipe, then wipe it off prior to prepping the pipe for gluing. In an effort to avoid botching the job (as I'm sometimes prone to do by rushing), I thought I'd try something I once saw somewhere. The idea is to line up the joints and then to draw marker lines at the joints so that you can line them up again later when gluing. Well, it almost worked...of course I rushed this and confused myself which marks lined up with which. There were a lot of pieces put together and I messed up the two 45° elbows. Ended up having to cut one off after gluing and regluing. Good thing I bought a couple of extra pieces last night.

And here's the finished assembly. You can still see some of the joint marks that are lined up. So they do help, so long as you remember which ones go with which. Next time I have to do something like this I think I'll try a trick from my days of writing flowcharts: use arrows and circled labels. That should disambiguate the lines. I almost started doing this but I did it symbolically. For some marks I used double lines instead of just one. Alphanumeric labels of course would have been clearer. Tomorrow I'll test this and see if there are any leaks. I'm not quite sure about that top PVC to brass connection...seems a bit flimsy.