I've been re-working some plumbing the past couple of days. We installed a water softener a couple months back. The install kit came with copper adaptors to hook from the plastic softener fittings into, presumably, copper plumbing. Well, the rest of the setup was PVC and as we all know from high school plumbing class (how come they don't have those?) you can't hook copper to pvc without some sort of fancy adaptor. Looking at the nice clean copper pipe and how it fit so snuggly into the PVC elbow I was just sure that I could make it work. Clean, glue, wait to dry...huh, seems to work. A day later it's crying small plumbing tears. No problem. Clean, dry, goop on a bunch of silicon bathroom sealent, dry. Ah, it works!

Or at least it worked until a few days ago when the tears came back with gusto. Off to the store to buy twenty bucks worth of adaptors and misc. parts while the household goes without water. Cut, swear, clean, swear, glue, swear, dry...still leaks, more swearing ensues. With plumbing you sort of paint yourself into a corner during the initial install, leaving only so much play, even in a semi-flexible system like PVC. Ten dollar adaptors don't take up less room so something's got to give. It's like giving a haircut where you end up changing the style to make up for cutting too much hair, hoping that it doesn't spiral out of control.

All along I've known exactly what part would work, it's just that no one has bothered to create and sell such a doohickey. I need one of those 3D printers, where I can download my mental image, along with a helping of more precise specifications, and out comes a custom part. I'm not alone in this, at one point I went to a plumbing supply store and in no time at all I had salesmen and customers alike creating the Frankenstein of all PVC connectors.

"You jus wanna sweat a copper threaded half inch male on this thing here and then getcha a female three quarter inch threaded and glue that onto your pvc pipin'."

I didn't go that route, my pipe sweating days are all over and it would have added six inches of plumbing where I've got room for three. Besides, over at Plumber's World they say that female PVC screwed fittings aren't a good idea...they eventually crack under pressure.

Finally threw in the towel (onto all of the puddles of water, of course) and went to bed. This morning, freshly optimistic, I bought even more parts. Money, the project needed more money thrown at it. Followed that offering with a whole bunch of cleaning, cutting, gluing and swearing. I *think* it's fixed.

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