22mm can be difficult to get tight enough in some cases... a bit depends
on the ease access and the size of the spanners etc[1].

I usually stick a few turns of PTFE on the threads to act as a lubricant,
and stop it squeaking when tightened. It tends to make it easier to get
the water tight joint with less physical force since more of the torque
gets to actually rotating the joint rather than overcoming the friction.

[1] I remember having great difficulty tightening the nuts on the ends of
some butterfly service valves in a CH pipe above a kitchen cabinet. There
was probably only 6" of height between cabinet and ceiling, and that meant
that longer spanners could not rotate enough to get the next flat into
position, and short ones could not get enough torque in there easily!

Might be a day or two before I can try anything. My elder daughter has
had to go to hospital tonight, and they've kept her in, so I don't know

Sorry to hear that. Hope she's well soon!

quite what time I'm going to have Sunday to 'play', and I am pretty busy
next week with the 'day job'. I'll let you know how it goes. Thanks
again for the advice lads.

Let us know how it works out...


Thanks for your kind thoughts, John. Nothing too serious hopefully, so she
should be out this afternoon.

All understood on the plumbing issues. The place where this valve is to be
located, is not exactly 'tight' for space, but you are on a ladder as it is
high up on the wall above a door, and a plastic waste pipe does run below
it, which makes it a bit restrictive to get spanners on. I'm really
beginning to think that not enough tightening is the issue now. I was
holding the body of the valve still with an adjustable spanner, and
tightening with full sized Moles, which I suppose might actually have been
introducing additional friction problems from distorting the compression
nut.

I have a chum who is a car man, and has every conceivable spanner type and
size, known to man. He has volunteered to come and have a go (he's a proper
DIY-er as well). I think that I am still going to go down the route of
fitting 15 mm 'tails' to the valve using the B&Q copper reducers and
conventional olives. When I did this originally, it actually looked a nice
solution. It will also allow us to do the 'grunt' work on getting it to
seal, off site using a vice etc. I can then fit it back in using a pair of
15 mm compression couplings, which will at least then make the job of
patching the pipe up, just a case of two new olives and a length of pipe,
should it have to come back out yet again ... :-)

Arfa
--
Cheers,

John.

/================================================== ===============\
| Internode Ltd - http://www.internode.co.uk |
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
| John Rumm - john(at)internode(dot)co(dot)uk |
\================================================= ================/