Fortunately, this morning when I woke up, I had the idea of a holesaw, no idea why the thought never occured to me before ! Senility creeping in already i guess
Havn't had a chance to try it yet because of the nightmare of all nightmares ! If you are a home DIY'er or a college chimp like me, you may find this tale of interest !
First off, the hot and cold taps on both the basin and the bath were on the wrong sides, so, I kinda (rightly i feel) assumed whoever had done the original install was a bit of a plonker, so when I saw what appeared to be 22mm going into the bath tap connectors I just thought it was another plonkerism.
HA !!! How wrong can a man be ... bloody 3/4" imperial piping ! it goes without saying that I had cut the pipe and discovered this gem when I tried to put a 22mm cap on it to stop some dribbling (the stop valves are naff as well !!). To cut a drama short I spent half the day mucking about with PTFE and flying around to find 3/4" > 15mm ........ Not an easy task on Cup Final day !! Ended up having to solder a converter and a reducer. Not that it worked of course on the dribbly pipe ! Out again tomorrow to try and find a compression converter, but somehow I don't feel the Sunday fodder of B&Q and Homebase will be of much help !
What gets me is that the house was built in 1980 apparantly and it looks like the whole blooming gaff is in Imperial. With my limited knowledge, should I have forseen this ? I thought the metric stuff had come in during the 70's ?
There is however a morale to all this, what I have learnt today and whilst doing a couple of other jobbies for friends has been invaluable ! There's nothing on earth to drum a point home when youre working on your own ! Doubtless some will, with some justification, raise their eyes to the ceiling at the incompetence of a rookie plumber, but these are lessons which cannot be learnt in a college workshop and will most certainly never be forgotten !!