Quote:
Originally Posted by bigredfish
I had an old fiberglass bathtub that cracked so am replacing and noticed that the drain seemed to have a small leak as there is a little bit of build up at the joint as you can see in the photo. So I figured it would be best to just replace this at the same time since the tub is out of the way. But there is this plastic like hard compound stuff all over and nothing can be removed... Can anyone tell me what and how to remove this stuff and can I just break it free and yank everything out and then replace it?
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Whatever that blue stuff is, it's not supposed to be there, so that's reason enough to replace the drain & overflow.
There will be a P-trap under that PVC drain and overflow. If you can get under that floor, you can see whether that blue stuff is all over the p-trap too.
I'd replace all the plastic that blue stuff is on cuz it may cause you problems in future if you ever needed to replace that drain & overflow or the p-trap under it. You might not be able to cut the pipe where you'd want to cuz that blue stuff is on the pipe there, and could very well interfere with the plastic cement dissolving the PVC the way it should so that you don't get a strong and waterproof connection. Now that you have good access cuz the tub is out, now's the time to do that. If you had to deal with that blue stuff all over the drain piping only from below, it'd just be harder to do.
I'm thinking the way to proceed would be to get under the floor with a reciprocating saw and see if there's a connection anywhere under there that you can undo. If not, cut through the drain pipe and cut through that blue stuff too (if you can) and pull the drain (and p-trap) out with that blue stuff still attached.
But, I've been lucky enough not to have ever needed to replace a tub drain and overflow, so maybe wait for one of the plumbers in here to confirm (or disagree with) my advice.