Turned plastic washers for plumbing fixture connections

[FliesLikeABrick]

A while back we bought a commercial kitchen pre-wash station from an auction, so that we could set up in our basement to blast dirt and bugs off of produce from the garden and do some other light processing work before canning/freezing, etc. This would prevent us from taking over the kitchen for those times, plus give somewhere for produce to drip dry and the potentially high volumes of plain rinse water can go out our sump pump instead of into our septic system



Took the sprayer off the sink for transport. In doing so lost one of the washers used to connect the sprayer valve manifold to the inlets, and the other one was hard/old/chewed up.

Deviced to make new ones from an offcut of what is probably HDPE





Pretty straight forward, turned the OD down to just smaller than the minor diameter of the female threads (approximately 1-3/16), and drilled the ID to roughly the size of the hex broached into the mating surface (13/16)



Then parted off with the insert parting tool and fine feed, which worked better than I expected - I was most worried about if the parting operation would gall the surface, since that is the most critical feature to seal properly






Installed and sealed up great

 

[silence dogood]

This is why we have several thousand dollars' worth of machinery. It seems that even though Ace Hardware to Home Depot may have hundreds of plumbing parts, the one 69 cent washer is not available.

 

[FliesLikeABrick]

This is why we have several thousand dollars' worth of machinery. It seems that even though Ace Hardware to Home Depot may have hundreds of plumbing parts, the one 69 cent washer is not available.

Yep. I did a lap around Lowes Depot looking for something close and came up empty. I probably could be successful at the plumbing supply house but it would take me a week to get there on their hours, and I wouldn't have a specific part name or number to reference, just an ambiguous "I need a plastic or rubber sealing washer of approximately this size"....
Faster and easier to just make it.