The other day I broke the stem on the garden hose faucet outside my house. It happens my wife is in Guatemala, so like any husband I thought to myself, "I better fix this before she gets home and finds out." It would be difficult to replace the whole faucet but I thought perhaps I can just replace the stem.
On Sunday I closed the water main and tried to take apart the faucet. It was old. I was holding it with one wrench and trying to twist off the nut with the other. I thought to myself, "I am likely to break this thing right off the pipe. Time to call a plumber." So I did. The plumber came two hours late on Tuesday. He was a genial, middle aged fellow with a weathered face. I said to him, "I was thinking maybe you could just replace the stem, rather than the whole thing." He said, "Sure, we can try that. It'll save time." Looking at the faucet: "That's a Premier brand half-inch. I have one on the truck. The thing is, I can try and open it up but I am likely to break it right off the pipe. You get only one chance." First he had to measure the water pressure. He screwed on the gauge, turned on the water, tapped the gauge, and said, "Huh. It is only 48. Kind of low. It should be 55. When did you put in the regulator?" "A couple of years ago. I have noticed it takes a long time to fill the bathtub." "Maybe I can adjust it. But you're not supposed to adjust those things after a year or so. You tend to break them." "Let's live with it then." We went back to the front of the house. He held the faucet with a heavy pipe wrench and tried to open the nut with an adjustable wrench. It did not budge. "Like I said, you get one chance at doing this. Let me try soaking it with WD-40." While we were waiting for the WD-40 to take, he told me that now that the kids have grown up he is thinking of dropping cable TV service and installing a digital antenna. Those cable TV and Internet people charge too much. He tried again and lo and behold the nut came off. He said, "we can replace all of the guts and it will be as good as new." He took apart the new faucet. After a while: "Oops. They have changed the design. The new stem does not fit. We'll have to do it the hard way. I will go under the house and cut off a foot or so of the pipe. I hope you have copper pipes instead of PVC. PVC is a pain in the butt to work with." "Don't worry, it's copper." He got ready to go into the crawl space, and I brought out a 50 foot extension cord and a powerful fluorescent work light I use under the house. "That looks handy," he said as he tied the work light electric cord to the extension cord and plugged them together. He went under the house and I went back to reading a rather dull biography of William Howard Taft. After a while he called me to the front of the house. He had a new section of copper pipe and he was soldering on a threaded connector. With admirable craftsmanship, he wrapped the threads in plumbers tape and then spread some kind of white goo on top of that, and screwed on the new faucet. "That's not going anywhere," he said, and he pushed the pipe through the hole in the wall. "I noticed that the spigot was previously set at an angle. Do you want it straight up and down?" "I guess so." "I'll go back under the house. I would appreciate it if you would keep an eye on the spigot here to make sure it stays straight when I solder the pipes together." While he was going around to the back yard and under the house again, I played around with the hose and the faucet. I realized it was too close to the ground and awkward to screw on. I heard him shout from under the house, "is it okay?" "It is hard to screw on the hose when it's straight up and down." "Well then cock it at an angle, the way they had it. . . . Okay, hold it there." After a while, there came a muffled voice from the ventilation grill a few feet away from the faucet. "I forgot the solder! Can you hand it to me?" "The spool will not fit through this grill. I will have to bring it to you." "Just unwrap it and hand me the end." I poked the end of the solder through the grill. "That's enough. Cut it off there; the cutter is in the toolbox." I went back to William Taft. A half-hour later I noticed he was not done and there was a banging noise from under the house. I went under the house and asked, "What's happening?" "There was a pinhole leak. I turned the water back on, came back down to check and it was spraying out. I don't understand why. It wasn't even at the joint. The pipe must have fractured for some reason. I had to cut another four inches of copper pipe and I'm putting in another connector. You better go check to see if the spigot is still at the angle you want it." I went to the front of the house and found the faucet . . . the spigot was upside down, and sticking out from the wall about a quarter inch. I yelled through the ventilator grill, "it is upside down, and sticking out!" "Huh. I thought I marked the top of the pipe down here. Turn it where it should be and whack it into the wall." A half-hour later it was finally done. A job that might have taken 30 minutes ended up taking hours. He was embarrassed it took so long. I said: "Don't fret. Fixed is fixed. It's a good thing you checked for a leak." "I always do." *** So what does this have to do with cold fusion experiments? More than you might think. First as a practical matter, cold fusion experiments are often about plumbing. Michael McKubre recently talked about his work with the Brillouin reactor. He said they are working hard to make the thing hydrogen leak proof, testing various seals and methods. This is a plumbing problem. In his book, Mizuno described how he made a steal cell with a Teflon lining on the inside. He tried a variety of different configurations, and worked at it day after day: ". . . the cell leaked 160 cc of nitrogen. I put the cell in a large bucket of water and determined that the leak originated from the power lead junction in the lid. Later I raised the pressure still further and discovered leaks at various other spots, centered around the junctions and ports on the lid, which took me two months to fix. I installed the coil heater around the base of the cell and tested the heating characteristics. I looked at the temperature rise with nitrogen, and I tested to see if high temperatures caused leaks. And indeed, I found a leak when the temperature of the whole cell was raised to 150°C at 50 atmospheres. This turned out to be coming from the Teflon packing in the joint between the lid and the body of the cell. I changed the design of this joint and had the cell machined again, and the leaks finally stopped. . . . In this tedious, step by step, painstaking fashion, I fixed various problems until I was at last ready to begin the main experiment. Although there is nothing new about an electrolytic cell, designing and building this one had been tough and getting it to work was a heck of a struggle. The lesson was once again brought home to me just how difficult it is to make a new machine work properly. . . ." It took him six months to make this cell work. Second, the process resembles doing an experiment in many ways. The plumber has to make careful observations and employ improvisation. He draws on experience. He knows and does dozens of things that an amateur would not. Small things, such as tapping the gauge, or tying the electric cords together, and larger things such as knowing you should not adjust a pressure regulator after it has been installed for a year or more. He needs good judgment. He has to know when to do things, and when not to do things. When it is best to leave well enough alone. He lives by the cardinal rule: always check your work. Perhaps the biggest resemblance between plumbing and doing experiments is the need for perfection, and how easy it is to make a mistake. When you do a hundred things right and one thing wrong, you fail. It makes no difference how hard you work or how many hours you put into it. The plumbing leaks, so it has to be done over. The cathode does not load, so you see no cold fusion reaction. You can have the best detector in the world at Kamiokande, but it does no good if you do the electrochemistry wrong. The plumber has been doing this sort of work day in and day out for decades. Yet despite his extensive experience, and craftsmanship, he made several blunders that would have been time-consuming if I had not been there, such as forgetting to bring the solder under the house, and nearly installing the faucet upside down the second time. Despite his knowledge he ran into inexplicable problems such as the pinhole leak. It does not matter how much you know or how routine the job is, when you work with your hands, with objects, every day you run into surprises and things you do not understand. This is why it usually takes longer than you expect. This is why plumbers and experiments often run late. There are other lessons. The previous plumber put the faucet in sideways. When you find something set up oddly, or in a way that you do not understand, stop and think before you change it. Ask yourself, was that carelessness, or was there a reason? Even when you do not know why people do something the way they do, it is often wise to stick with tradition. - Jed
