Done With The High-Tank

I was able to finish the mounting frame for the high-tank today. I said yesterday that is was “simple mortis and tenon construction”. I didn’t mean to say that making mortise and tenons is simple, only that the style they used was simple. I actually had a little trouble with making the tenons.

I desperately need a better table saw. My $150 POS table saw is just not going to cut it anymore. I was at Sears today buying a router bit for the tank frame and I drooled over several high-end table saws they had. The price is one thing, but the other is space. Some of these saws are as big as a dining room table. My little Model T sized garages don’t really accommodate big pieces of equipment like that. I’ll have to do something though.



Here’s the tank with the new frame. The stain is not an exact match, but it’s close enough. The reason I say the mortise and tenon joints are simple is because instead of making a mortise just big enough for the tenon, they cut a groove down the entire length of the board. Once the groove is there, the tenon can pretty much go in any place. There is a lot less measuring, and it makes it pretty simple to do. The whole thing is done on the table saw. I get the feeling these tanks were really cranked out of the factory way back when. It didn’t take a lot of skill, and one person could produce several in a day.



Here is a real mortise and tenon joint. The mortise is the pocket and the tenon is the opposing slender piece that slides in. On the frame, instead doing a nice pocket like that, they just milled a groove the entire length of the board. Then just slap in the tenon, glue it up, and cut off any excess. Next!

More High-Tank High-Jinx

When I bought the tank last year it was stuffed with an odd assortment of trim pieces and plumbing parts. I didn’t realize it until I got home, that even though I had gotten all of these “extra” parts, the toilet tank was, in fact, incomplete.

The high-tank I have installed in the upstairs bathroom mounts to the wall on a cleat that is not seen once the tank is in place. You mount the cleat on to the wall and then the tank hangs from it. The tank I bought last year, the one I just refinished, mounts in a slightly different manner.

The “new” tank has a 4 part trim piece that gets mounted to the wall, and then there are two hooks on the tank that mount on to the trim piece. The trim piece is kind of like a picture frame for the tank. It has some mill work on it, and it is exposed on three sides of the tank. I said it’s a 4 part trim piece, but I only got two of the parts, and they were both the same part, so really I only got one of the 4 parts of the frame.

2 Left Sides Don’t Make a Right


Hooks on the back of the tank.


So today I started the construction of the new “mounting frame”. On Wednesday I went to Almquist lumber to pick up some oak. Almquist is pretty much the only lumber yard around here that carries anything but pine, fir, or redwood. They have just an amazing assortment of wood. I’m really not interested in all the exotic woods they carry, but I was happy to see that they have redwood 1X8 siding that matches the profile of my house, and they have curly and burl redwood in stock! All I needed was 3-feet of 1X6 oak, but I felt like a kid in a candy store walking around the place.



Anyway, the frame s pretty simple, mortise and tenon construction. Tomorrow after the glue sets I’ll round two corners and then round over one edge with the router. After that will be the tricky part of matching the finish of the tank.

Did I Say Oak?

On Saturday I should have said “Painted Oak” when I was describing the high-tank I bought last year at a local salvage place. Grrr! Why do people paint these things. Luckily it was just one thin coat of paint over a thick layer of shellac. I can honestly say this was the easiest thing I’ve ever stripped in my life.

I think part of it has to do with the fact that it was a tank mounted 6 or 7 feet up on a wall. It probably didn’t get banged around too much up there. Stripping paint off shellacked wood can be easy when it hasn’t been dinged too much. When you bang in to a piece of wood the paint gets forced in to the grain. That’s when it’s hard to get out.

Also, I think maybe because it was oak, it may have made it seem easier to strip than other things I’ve stripped paint off of. I’m accustomed to working with redwood, and while the straight grained, old-growth stuff is hard, it still isn’t oak.

I used my patented 5 step paint stripping method.

Step 1: Heat Gun
Step 2: Jasco Semi-Paste and Steel Wool
Step 3: Boiled Linseed Oil & Turpentine
Step 4: Touch-up minor specks with artist paints
Step 5: Shellac

For Step 2 I let the Jasco sit on only one or two minutes and then rub very lightly with the steel wool. I then have a stack of paper towels waiting as I use the scraper again to gently get off the goo. The idea is to try and disturb the original finish as little as possible. If there is no paint residue left I will use denatured alcohol instead of the Jasco paint stripper.

It took me maybe 3 hours to get all of the paint off and refinish the tank. Refinishing didn’t require much because the original finish, sans shellac, was in very nice shape once I got everything off. I wiped it once with a light coat of BLO and turpentine, and then gave it a few coats of shellac. The thing looks great. There are a few chips and some minor cracks, but I decided to leave them for character.

This is just after I bought it in October of 2005


This is today after 2 coats of shellac

Testing Ballcock, Liner, Spud, and Float

Working with plumbing is hard enough when it’s all new. When you add in the dynamics of 100 year old plumbing built before standardization, you never know what you’re going to be dealing with. Today’s challenge was to test the oak high-tank for the toilet.

The high-tank works exactly the same as the low-tank only it’s mounted 6 or 7 feet up on the wall. I needed to make sure a few things worked properly before I started buying parts next week. First there is a copper liner I needed to make sure didn’t leak. The oak won’t hold water so the tank has a copper liner inside that holds the water. The liner passed with flying colors.

Next, there is the ballcock and valve system that fills the tank with water and then shuts off at the proper time. This works with a floating ball, in this case also copper, that is raised with the water level. As the ball raises it slowly closes a valve. Once the ball gets to a desired height, the valve closes, and the tank is ready for the next flush.



Finally, I needed to make sure the spud was in good shape and could seal properly. The spud is a threaded pipe with a flair at one end. It goes through a hole in the copper liner and the oak tank. There is a rubber gasket inside the tank that creates a seal when a nut is tightened down from the outside of the tank. Essentially, the oak, copper liner, and then the rubber gasket are squeezed between the nut being screwed on to the pipe underneath, and the flair at the top of the pipe inside the tank. Next, the flush tube attaches to the threaded spud under the tank and it leads to the toilet.

Artists Rendition


The gasket was shot, but that was easy to replace. The problem arose when I tried to get a slip nut that would screw to the spud. I would need a slip nut to attach the flush tube. I still need to buy the flush tube, and it will come with it’s own slip nut, but I had to make sure the threads are modern standard plumbing threads. They are not.

The spud looks just like an inch and a half threaded pipe but the spacing on the threads is a little different. A new inch and a half slip nut will make it about a half of a turn before it binds up. I had a very similar problem with the other toilet I installed upstairs. I think it was in the 20s or 30s when threaded pipe for plumbing became standard. Anything before that seems to be a shot in the dark.

So, this was a good exercise. When I order plumbing parts in a week or so I can add a new inch and a half spud for the toilet tank.

The tank


What ever floats your float


Rube Goldberg would be proud

They Don’t Make ‘Em Like This Anymore

This is what I would love to have in my bathroom. Both of these items are on Ebay right now. One is in New Jersey, and is pick-up only – kind of a long drive for a toilet – although, as of this writing the high bidder is “californiajensens”. Sounds like it could be a long drive for them as well.

The second one has a current bid of $575 and the reserve has not been met. A little rich for my blood. It’ll be interesting to see what it goes for.

Click on the image to go to the listing

Meet The New Toilet – HAJOCA

I went over the Gary’s house today before he got off work to pick up the toilet. I knew he wouldn’t want to take the $50 for it, so I gave it to his wife instead. I also picked up a few sacks of garbage as per our agreement.

His wife and I went out in to the backyard to get the toilet and there were two of them sitting under a tree. One was a newer, complete toilet sitting upright. The one I wanted was the 100 year old one, laying over on it’s side in the mud. It’s just the bowl and has no tank, also the seat was broken.

His wife looked at me like I was crazy as I pulled it out of the dirt. She pointed to the cracked seat, and said, “That one’s broken”. I took a few minutes to explain to her I was not worried about the seat. I told here how I was going to be using it for an old high-tank toilet. Her eyes widened as the story progressed. I'm not sure if she was impressed or thought I was even crazier then she first suspected.

Here’s a few shots of the toilet sans mud, spiders, and an army of ants.







I had never heard of the Haines, Jones, Cadbury Co before, but a quick search on the internet told me that they started in Philadelphia around 1860 and are still in business today under the name Gorman. The “HAJOCA” comes from the first two letters of each of the partners names “HA” “JO” “CA”. It seems that they got their start in brass pipe fittings for steam systems and expanded in to other plumbing supplies. The gentleman in the center of the logo is William Penn. I found an early advertisement stating they had done all the plumbing for the Princeton University Graduate School.

The toilet looks surprisingly like the 1922 American Standard “Pacific” that is in my upstairs bathroom. It makes me wonder if maybe it was made by Standard for HAJOCA, and they just added the HAJOCA label. From what I read, HAJOCA was first and foremost a brass foundry.

The real difference between the 2 toilets is that the HAJOCA has an inch and a half spud on the back, so it was designed to be a high tank bowl. The Standard Pacific has a 2 inch spud on the back. I know for a fact that it was originally a low tank toilet. I had to buy a reducing spud when I turned it in to a high tank.

The best thing about these old toilets is the enclosed trap. Notice how smooth and slender the sides are below the bowl. I don’t know why they have the exposed trap on most new toilets. It makes them so hard to clean.

On Going Negotiations

Two weeks ago I talked about my collection of antique plumbing parts that I want to transmogrify in to even older plumbing parts for the downstairs bathroom. The stuff I have is the wrong vintage, and also, it’s just the wrong type in many cases.

I have 3 complete toilets that pre-date WWII, and then 3 toilet tanks. The toilets are nice, but they don’t look right. I’ve decided to lean Victorian in the bathroom and the 1931 Standard Moderns toilet, for instance, would look out of place with it’s art deco lines.

So I contacted a place called DEA Bath to see if they would want to buy or trade my plumbing parts for some things I am going to need from them. It’s been a few days shy of two weeks, and I contacted them by snail mail, so it’s not time to panic because I haven’t heard of them. At the time I contacted them there was really nothing I needed in the meager selection of local salvage places, so I didn’t offer the items to anyone locally. Well, this past week that changed.

One of the 3 or so places in town that would deal with this sort of thing has decided to go out of business after more than 2 decades because the owners are retiring. Another place in town, actually owned by some friends of mine, negotiated to take some bulky items off their hands. They got some display cases, and things like that. Also as part of this deal they got 2 Victorian marble vanities, a per WWI Crane toilet, an two oak tanks. Any of these items would be perfect for my bathroom.

I won’t go in to why those items weren’t available to me when I went in to the store that is now closing. It is a troubling question as to why I can go in to a salvage place and ask about toilets and marble vanities and the owners tell me there is nothing available, and yet they magically appear a few weeks later. I won’t go in to this because it speaks volumes about the owners of this place that is now closing down. I’ve been in their shop many times in the last 4 years and the only time I ever bought anything was when I purchased it from their assistant. I could write several blog entries about my odd experiences with the owners, but I’ll just leave the whole thing there.

So now I have two vanities, a complete Crane toilet, and 2 oak high tanks without the bowls to chose from. I already have an oak high tank, but I need a rear spud bowl, and I also need a marble vanity. My friends called me on Saturday and told me the items were now in their possession and I should come down to the shop. I dropped everything and ran.

It turns out the only thing I can use is one of the marble vanities. I don’t need the two oak tanks and they don’t want to brake up the Crane tank and bowl set. That’s fine. They then came over to my house on Sunday to view my selection. To be honest, a lot of the stuff I have is not too spectacular. The 1931 Standard Modernus is pretty cool, and then I have 2 very, very nice tanks with matching lids from the early 1920s. Those three items together would go for about $1,600 on the DEA Bath web site. Throw in the other tanks, toilets, and sink I have and they retail for more than $2,500 on-line. I’m not going to get retail for them, I know.

The real interesting thing was one of the tanks I have. It is a 1922 Standard tank and it is an exact match for a tank they have in their one and only bathroom at their house. They’re nuts about antique plumbing and plan on putting in two more bathrooms in their house. They really would love to have this tank. Advantage Greg.

We haven’t talked money yet, and I’m not even sure what they are asking for the marble vanity with sink. They showed me a very nice 1902 Trenton Pottery china bowl that they have at home that they said they could make available to me. What I would really like to have is the 1897 toilet bowl they recently acquired. They plan to put it in their downstairs bath. There house is a 1910 Colonial Revival Four Square and I joked when I saw it about how that 1897 bowl would be much more fitting in my house. {It was no joke}

Then this morning as I was leaving for work my neighbor Gary, the now famous plumber who helped me in more ways than I can remember when I was re-plumbing my house, was also leaving. We both leave for work at roughly the same time and frequently see each other in the mornings. I was pulling away from the curb as he was coming out the front door so I backed up to his truck and we chatted for a few minutes.

I recalled that he had an old rear spud toilet tank sitting in the mud in his backyard. I was helping him pull out some bamboo or something one day and I saw it there half buried. I pulled it out of the mud and asked him about it. He said he has several toilets here and there and he installs them here and there when he’s doing work on the side. He held on to that one incase someone might want a high tank installed some day. This was 6 months ago so I wasn’t really thinking about toilets and bathrooms at the time.

Well, this morning I asked him if it was still in the mud in his backyard. He said it was, and I said I’d give him $50 for it. He said I could have it. He didn’t say it casually like, “Sure, you can have it if you want it”. It was more like, “You can have it! Please take it and get it out of my yard!” He then said his wife would love it if some of the toilets left the property. He went on to tell me he has all the pipes for it was well.

I insisted I would give him $50 and he insisted he didn’t want the money. I TOLD him I was giving him the money and then I mentioned I was going to the dump on Thursday and asked if he had anything that needed to go. He said, “The toilets yours but you have to make dump runs for a month.” I said, “Fine, and you get $50.” And then I drove off. I’m going to the dump on Thursday so I’ll go and get the toilet and a few bags of garbage while Gary’s at work. I’ll collect the toilet and leave $50 with his wife.

Now I’m thinking what I really want is the marble vanity and the 1897 toilet. You should see this thing. Even if I don’t get it, which I almost assuredly won’t, I’ll have to take pictures of it. The thing is a work of art. Regardless of what I end up with, I have quite a bit to offer. The pièce de résistance is the matching 1922 tank to the toilet my friends already own. Even though they won’t admit how much they really want it, I now they really, really want it.

So what I’m thinking about doing is offering them everything I have for the marble vanity and the 1897 toilet. They will never go for it. The 1897 toilet is too much of a treasure. Regardless, it’s worth a shot. I will essentially be offering 4 complete vintage toilets, 2 vintage tanks, and a vintage sink. I’d take the deal if I were them. Wouldn’t you?

.

I’ve got it, but it’s wrong…

It dawned on me, as I was looking at the pricey antique toilets and vanities at DEA Bath, that I have a plethora of antique bathroom items, they’re just the wrong style. I wouldn’t call these trash by any stretch of the imagination, but you know the saying, One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure.

I own three complete toilets from the 20s, 30s, and 40s, plus another tank and lid from the 20s. All are very desirable and fetch a commanding price when they are cleaned up. I also own a 1920s bathroom sink and a very early brass toilet flapper out of an old high tank toilet. This is all in addition to the clawfoot tub and oak high tank that I already plan to use in the downstairs bathroom.

Getting rid of all these items locally would take a while. It’s a small town and people won’t snap these things up immediately. I could sell them on-line, but it's kind of a pain to ship these types of items. They are very heavy and would require a lot of packing. It’s odd that I did check out Ebay just to see what old toilets would sell for and there was only one listed. It was a fancy English painted and embossed Victorian toilet bowl starting at $650. My aren’t quite in the same category as that, but you would think there would have been at least on antique toilet like mine listed. Odd. Anyway, I got to thinking that one place that might be interested in them is DEA Bath. I’ve contacted them to see if they’re interested in buying them from me. I told them I would take store credit.

If it goes well, this could give me a lot of store credit. DEA Bath is a little south of Sacramento. I could load up the car with all the supplies and make it a one day round trip. I haven’t heard back from them yet, so, fingers crossed. Click this link here to see crude pictures of my inventory.

Salvage Gloat

My neighbor a few houses down the street just became the proud owner of a bouncing baby antique & salvage store. Actually the store has been around for several years, but it is new to her. We don’t get those great salvage yards like you find in big cities. You know the kind where they have a half dozen claw foot tubs sitting in front of a dozen fireplace mantles which are holding up a few hundred old doors. Around here they are smaller and mostly have antiques, a lot of which is from out of the area, a lot of junk, and then a little salvage. You really have to be on top of things if you want the good stuff.

I make – or try to make - a weekly trip to the two places that have any real salvage. The place in question recently changed owners and Sheri, my neighbor, is the new owner. She had worked there for many years and recently took over the business. I stopped in on Sunday and Sheri and Rose (Be still my heart), the old owners daughter, were working the store.

I stopped and chatted with both for a while and then made my way around the store. This place is actually pretty big. It is in two neighboring buildings, both over 100 years old, and covers 3 floors. Mostly furniture. In the back on top of a desk I saw an old oak high-tank toilet tank. It was marked $49.00. As I said there isn’t a lot of this sort of thing in this town and when it shows up it doesn’t last long.

I’m not going to be doing the downstairs bathroom for several years but you’ve got to get it when you find it. I told Sheri I wanted to buy the tank and she feigned shock and dismay because I rarely buy stuff but I look a lot. I told here it was marked at $49.00 so I would have to come back for it. She asked me how much I had in my pocket and I pulled out $36.00. She said that’s close enough and the tank was mine. It is a good thing I ate lunch before I stopped in or I would have paid $41.00 for it.

All The Parts Are There And I Already Have The Old Bowl
There Is Oak Under That White Paint