[Bill]

Following Eric's lead, I, too, took the top of my toilet to Philips for crack repair. Although the repair looks OK at this point, I would have been more pleased if it had been repaired like Eric's.

I took it in a week ago, talked with Matt (he remembered Eric's piece), and left it with him. He expected to have it in a week or so. After a week, I called for a progress report. The girl in the front office apparently mistook this for badgering, and since Matt was out of town for a few days, she gave it to another guy. She called me later the same day, and I went to pick it up. Biggest difference that I can see is that there was no reinforcing done. The repair guy apparently cleaned out the crack, but then simply ran a bead on both sides with a thermal welder, using some chips he scraped off the rear lip of the piece (just as was done with Eric's). The repair was ground and polished on top, and looks really good, but it lacks the reinforcing "plate" that shows in Eric's photo. We'll see how it holds up.

I asked the repair guy what the material was. He said that in spite of his 27 years of experience, he couldn't tell except that it was some kind of cross-linked polymer material. And they are notoriously hard to work with. None of the solvents they had - and they had many - would touch it. So the thermal weld is as much of an answer as there is going to be.

One other note. As can be seen in Eric's pictures, he brought in his unit with the bowl still attached, and Matt worked around it. I decided to remove the bowl. Since I was hand-carrying it in, rather than shipping it, I'm not sure that I should have. The screws on the underside that hold the bowl in place are shiny-new in Eric's photo's, but on mine they were so horribly rusted that the heads were deformed, and there was no way that a big Phillips screwdriver was going to get enough of a grip to do the job. To get them out, I had to grind a slot in the screw head with a Dremel tool - a hacksaw would have worked - and back them out with a big screwdriver. For reassembly I didn't want to use the same screws - too much metal gone - but I found that they can be replaced with simple #10 x 5/8 sheet metal screws. The thread pitch is slightly different from the originals, but they work.

Finally, I asked both the repair guy and the front office manager if they like this kind of one-off work, or if they consider it an annoyance. He agreed that it was not their major focus, but that they did a lot of one-off work and welcomed it. And sure enough, they had car mirrors, motorcycle gas tanks, and dozens of other similar plastic parts visible in the workshop. So if you need a toilet repair, I think you can ship the piece to them and expect good service. The price to me was the same as it was for Eric, $40 cash ($50 credit card).

By the way, there was a suggestion in an earlier thread that the toilet top material might be PVC. It's not. PVC cement doesn't touch it. Neither does paint thinner, denatured alcohol, MEK, PVC cleaner, SuperGlue cyanoacrylate, or epoxy for plastics. However, although I don't know what it is, I know that there really is a solvent or glue that is quite successful. On my unit, the rim of the bowl (deep blue) was glued to the underside of the toilet top at the back center. This glue patch was very hard to break apart.

Bottom line, if you take or send your piece in, I would suggest that you ask specifically for Matt to do the work, and allow time for him to get it into his schedule. Mention the reinforcing plate, and perhaps provide one of Eric's pictures to illustrate what you mean.

Bill