Chamblee54

The commode in the back bathroom was not working. I usually don’t use this facility, and had put off taking a look. When I took the lid off, and took a test flush, the flapper valve floated off to one side. The water was not collecting in the tank. This is a problem.
Like most reasonable people, I don’t like to work on toilets. I usually screw things up, and make them worse than before. The potential for getting hurt is there. Finally, I took a deep breath, and found a video about how to do this. It seemed pretty simple. The pipe next to the flapper has two pegs on it. The flapper has two holes, one on each side, that fit over the two pegs.
The only troubling detail was the fact that the commode to be fixed did not have mounting pegs, on the pipe. It was an older model, and the flapper was attached to the piple with a flexible rubber flap. This was going to be a problem.
After a trip to the store, to purchase a new flapper, the work started. Yes, a closer examination of the pipe did not reveal any mounting pegs. Maybe if I secure the flapper in place, then it would not float away. I took an old bicycle inner tube, cut off about 9″. I wrapped the tubing around the base of the pipe, on top of the flapper flapper. The 9″ of inner tube was held in place with a cable tie. This did not work. The good news is cutting the cable tie off, and not my finger.
Maybe what I needed to do was take off the old school flapper, take it to a store, and see if they had one. To do this, I had to remove the flapper. To remove the flapper, I had to take a bracket off the pipe. The bracket had two little holes in it. Originally, there was a pin that went through those holes to the flapper. When you flushed, a that pin went up, and the pin pulled the flapper up. The pin is long gone, but the bracket remains. Unfortunately, this metal part has been underwater for 64 years. It was not going to come off. Searching for the funny shaped screwdriver was of little use.
The next plan was to hold the flapper flapper in place, with a cable tie only. This cable tie was 8″ long, and had a few inches left over, after wrapping it around the 1″ pipe. Wrapping this around the base of the pipe did not work, until I noticed 2 holes in the side of the flapper. These holes are in the same location as the holes on the modern flapper, which you can put over the pegs on the pipe. What would happen if you twisted the cable tie, so that the leftover cable tie formed a psuedo peg, which you then thread the flapper hole through? And then you attach another cable tie to the pipe, positioning the leftover cable tie to the other side, and stick this leftover cable tie through the other flapper hole. When you turn on the water, and flush the toilet, this works. Sometimes you do more good than harm. Pictures today are from The Library of Congress.