Welcome to my two part series called “Three Valve Shower Body Repair”. This is part 1.
In this two part series I take you through the steps on removing and replacing the stems and seats in a three valve shower body. When I started in the business back in the late 60’s early 70’s we would actually replace the washers, seats and re-pack the stems with new graphite packing. In today’s world that’s not a cost effective alternative any more so we just replace the old with new O.E.M. parts when available
The manufacturer featured in the video is Gerber which in my opinion makes a real good product and is very popular here on the east coast. Some other popular makers of this style shower body are Price Pfister, Sterling, Central to name a few. They’re similar in design with slightly different takes on how the sleeves and escutcheons are attached. As in most of the videos to date , I’m demonstrating on the bench top with a new fitting which means everything is being removed easily. A word of caution is that in the real world this may not be the case, and you’re going to need a couple of specialty tools which I point out in the video. As you can see in the video this shower body is set quite deep into the wall which can make removing the chrome sleeves a challenge. Before attempting to remove the sleeves regardless of how shallow or deep into the wall they are, you have to chip away and remove the tile grout or caulking. This will increase the success rate of unscrewing and removing the sleeve without any damage.
Although we live in a world of Single Lever anti-scald shower body’s, rest assured that their are thousands of these shower body’s still in service and at some point they’re going to need repair. I laid out some recommended tools for this repair so check them out before you begin and if you have any questions, drop me a line at info@bobsplumbingvideos.com. I’ll see you in part 2:
Three Valve Shower Body Repair – Part 2
Happy Plumbing!
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