Delta single handle ball faucets (1963) | Hacker News Reader

Delta single handle ball faucets (1963)

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60 pointsuserbinator47 comments

Oh my god, actual dimensions on a drawing, part numbers, AND service instructions!?! I work on industrial equipment with 1/10th the documentation presented here.

Cool find, op!

No wonder our grandparents generation were good with mechanical things. If they were looking at materials like that all the time - I feel like you'd build an intuitive sense of how common household devices work pretty easily if it were so clear and accessible.

Literature on doing things was much more practical. There was a culture of things being repairable. There was a pride in one’s work. Check this out if you don’t believe me: http://vintagemachinery.org/pubs/1617/30720.pdf

The rise of the publicly traded corporation run by fiduciary duty has, in my opinion, squeezed out repairability, pride, and workmanship for marginal financial gains.

I fear it won’t have been worth it in the long run. Shame short term incentives run the show.

Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes. I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone. Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.

The reason our grandparents generation was good at fixing things is because they had to be. My grandparents lived through the Great Depression and worked difficult manual labor jobs. Contrary to the Reddit memes about how past generations lived like kings on trivial jobs, they worked extremely hard for everything and made it last.

It’s really easy to get service manuals and do basic maintenance on simple things like faucets these days. I think the only reason it’s becoming common for people to not know how to do basic repairs or even find basic service information is that many people grew up never having to think about it. I still have adult friends who went from living with their parents to dorms to rented apartments who never learned the first thing about maintaining or fixing things around the house because they’ve never had to and they don’t want to - and they can keep going that way without really losing anything. It’s a choice at this point, but it works for them.

Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down. They mostly contain simple Ikea-like instructions and a lot of legalese CMA warnings. That is not a dig at Ikea. Their instructions are great for assembling flatpack furniture. But servicing a faucet, a garage door or a lawn mower is on another level.

This state of affairs is partly due a change in the nature of products. They are in general more complex and no longer meant to be repairable. They are meant to have shorter life spans, and if serviceable are meant to be serviced by professionals. How much that is an improvement for the consumer, is questionable IMO.

> Manuals are fairly easy to find, but in my experience they are dumbed-down.

I just linked to the full CAD library for the modern version of these parts, though. It’s not dumbed down.

Use the search phrase “service manual” and you can find documentation for every appliance in your house. I frequently fix appliances for friends and even neighbors and have yet to be unable to find the service manual.

Same for cars.

I’m so confused by this comment section. Why is everyone convinced that the situation is so much worse today?

> Materials like this are infinitely more accessible to us than our grandparents generation. We all have devices in our pockets that can get to service manuals for our products in minutes.

You mean minutes to find the right bootleg manual site with PDF for an adjacent product category, then some more minutes to realize you cannot safely (if at all) get at the manual, some more minutes to find a different bootleg PDF site, realize that it's actually not close enough to the model you have, and 1h later, finally find the good enough PDF... only to realize that "service manuals" today are often useless, and decide to repeat this process on YouTube?

> I can have common parts at my door overnight from Amazon with the press of a button on my phone.

Overnight is often too long. Also good luck finding the right parts and reconciling conflicting IDs between manuals, manufacturers and vendors.

> Every local hardware store carries replacement cartridges and gaskets for common faucet types.

Except when 90% of the faucets are uncommon, and support for them gets effectively discontinued after a few years.

Now contrast that with our grandparents, who usually had repair manuals included with the product, most parts were universal (and probably on-hand or extractable from something else at home), and you could actually go to a local hardware store where the clerk would be able to figure out what parts you needed on the spot, and with luck had them in stock.

I'm not claiming our grandparents had it better in general, but let's also not pretend there are no downsides to ongoing specialization and market competition. We may have more stuff, prettier stuff, better stuff[0], but nothing is ever compatible with anything, it's that way on purpose, and people are no longer supposed to repair anything themselves.

[0] - That's highly debatable in appliance space.

I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.

My generation learned how to plug computer components together and install operating systems and drivers.

The reason people did that is because they (more or less) had to.

The generation being born today will need neither of those skill sets.

Cars, by and large, stay working for as long as people care to keep them and the things that do go wrong are, mostly, uneconomical to fix at home.

It's likewise rare for, dunno, uninstalling a video game to accidentally delete some crucial OS dependency that causes the thing to need to be reformatted.

It's hard to say what skills the next generation will learn, but I can guarantee there will be something that they need that their children will not. And that they'll complain about their children being useless for not knowing whatever that is.

No, we just outsourced car maintenance to professional shop services. Both because mechanical aspects have become reliable enough to last a year without maintenance and because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated.

> because electronic/computer aspects are mind-bogglingly complicated

And because it's software, it happens to be a perfect way for the manufacturer to extract rent (er, "recurring revenue") from car repair business. It's not complexity that's shaping how end-user repair experience looks like, but the fact that you often need proprietary connector, proprietary software, and a valid license key to interface with the car's computer.

And because plenty of engineering goes into designing subsystems with the explicit but unstated purpose of making them close to impossible to repair without ultimately resorting to help from the manufacturer.

Software is just the latest layer on the cake. Non-repairable designs, special tools, unavailable parts, unavailable instructions, fragile and error prone procedures, encryption, and more. They're all occasionally used to with the main purpose of blocking any attempt to easily repair without generating revenue for the manufacturer and their network.

Source: I have family working for two large car manufacturers both in engineering and management, who have personally experienced explicit demands to make things hard to repair by the owner but make them in a way where a reasonable explanation can be used for plausible deniability.

> I mean, a generation or two ago, people frequently learned to do things like replace spark plugs and alternators and mess with oil changes.

These are all things I learned to do myself and have done recently (even the alternator).

Like I said, it’s easier than ever.

I’m kind of baffled that I’m getting downvoted for saying it on HN. Anyone with a little resourcefulness and a willingness to get their hands dirty can do these trivial operations too.

In the architectural space it’s common to have design files for everything, especially today.

I looked at Delta’s website and sure enough you can even download CAD models and drawings of their faucets: https://www.deltafaucet.com/bim-library

Is this a US thing? We renovated the apartment in Germany in the last year and every faucet and piece of equipment that we got has a manual including a table with list of parts and technical drawings and how to take it apart. We also got from the original owner all the manuals of the existing things, and this helped a lot in finding the proper part to replace and fix the bathtub drain. None of this is old stuff, the building is 15 years old.

No, it’s an internet thing. I’ve also installed bathroom fixtures recently (in the US) and my experience is the same as yours.

My other comment pointing out that these materials are still available and easily found online is getting downvoted.

I suspect a lot of the comments and arguments are coming from the perspective of people who haven’t done any of this type of work, so under a thread about a historical document they assume that the content of the document was only available in the past?

This is on of the stranger comment sections I’ve seen on HN lately. The comments about how only our grandparents learned how to do things like read manuals or change oil in their career is really revealing.

I paid a little more and waited a couple weeks to receive a Delta single handle faucet for my kitchen back in 2020, rather than just buying what was available on the shelf at Lowe's. Model: #400LF-WF. The reviews at the time said it was basically the same faucet made back in the 60s. I'm glad I did - it has been an excellent faucet.

It's interesting to see the prices back then - the model 400 cost $24.95 (see page 15), which would be around $260 today.

Incidentally, the newer variants also have flow restrictors, which aren't hard to remove.

> rather than just buying what was available on the shelf at Lowe's

Funny, that exact model dominates the shelf space at the Lowe's near me. Practically a whole bay for just those, over 50 in stock right now.

Weird. I figured at the time it was due to COVID related supply chain issues, but I just checked and they still don't stock them locally.

These types of faucets are so common where I live that I can’t really imagine what the alternative is. What do you have if you don’t have this?

Separate knobs for hot and cold, like this: https://www.homedepot.com/p/MOEN-Brantford-4-in-Centerset-2-...

Getting ”Access Denied” from that link.

I'm in Europe and the whole site is "Access Denied".

... or two separate taps even. Though it's quite a bit more exotic and ancient.

https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/news/1536/cpsprodpb/AF32/production...

You can have either completely separate hot and cold taps, each with their own spout, or you can have a setup with separate hot and cold knobs and a single spout.

For my bathroom sink I specified a two taps/one spout unit (similar to this one https://www.screwfix.com/p/swirl-traditional-chrome-104mm-cl... ) because I prefer to be able to get "this is definitely cold water with absolutely no hot water mixed in" when that's what I want. (My hot water comes from a combi boiler, so if you run the hot tap for a short time all that happens is you burn some gas when the boiler detects the water flow but you just get the cold water in the pipe.)

I like the combined handle type for showers, where you always want some hot water and are generally running the water for a long time.

These are such a horrible horrible idea, particularly the shower variant. You just can't have fine control when the thing moves in two dimensions, you want a little bit more shower pressure? How about I burn you instead? Whats wrong with having one dial for temperature and one for water pressure?

A quality faucet gives you fine control with a single handle. The difference with low quality stuff is striking. The price too.

Hmm, perhaps my issue has been the cheap university accomodation faucets (I'll still take them over the two seperate tap implementation still common in many houses in the UK though)

If you live in an economy where these are uncommon, travelling to one where they are common and especially the equivalent for shower control in hotels.. is a logistical nightmare.

Its the eigenvalue of taps. It's hot, or it's not, and which orifice it's coming out of is completely unclear as well as which motion causes more, or less of water and heat.

Left and right for hot and cold, up and down for more and less flow. Very intuitive.

It sems these days shower valves have all been enshittified to have exactly one dimension, which proceeds from "off" to "small trickle of cold water", then "slow flow of warm water", and finally "slow flow of barely hot water".

> Left and right for hot and cold, up and down for more and less flow. Very intuitive.

Unless someone wired the cold/hot in reverse, which happens surprisingly often.

Otherwise, agreed. Should be obvious and intuitive the first time you start using one.

The terms of sale are so clear and concise. But I don’t see a warranty period. Would they still replace a part on a 1961 sink?

Not sure about warranty, but a few years ago my mother's 80s(?) era Delta faucet started leaking. I sent a blurry photo to Delta's service team and a few days later had a link to a replacement part and an old manual scanned as a PDF. For a 40 year old product!

Ultimately we replaced the whole faucet and fixture, but that single reply probably made me a customer for life.

These are still very common in Sweden. I installed one when I renovated my kitchen a couple of years ago for example. Different design of course, but the same mechanism. 2 out of three bathrooms have similar ones too! Iirc the shower in the guest house does as well, but memory is fuzzy and I'm currently too far to check

When shopping for a home in Sweden, seeing a kitchen without single handed faucets is a telltale sign that the whole kitchen was designed with form prioritized over function.

It's a silly trade-off too: there are some really stylish single handed faucets on the market!

Not common for showers, though. Those almost always have separate temperature and flow controls.

We had one of these in our kitchen when I was growing up before we renovated in the late 90s. Very cool.

I've never see the MR-510 dishwashing handle before - that seems so convenient!

I just installed a similar one in my bathroom, except the handle is on the side instead of on top. Also has a pull-down flexible hose that snaps back in with a magnet, very useful for cleaning.

I just changed a valve in one of these shower handles last year. They’re great. The Moen shower handles are pretty good too but the cartridges require a special tool to replace.

> the cartridges require a special tool to replace.

I find foul language to be the most effective tool for this job.

Wow. This is exactly my kitchen faucet. Which makes sense, because my house was built in 1961.

Works great. Amazing how durable the faucet is!

My shower and all my sinks have this design.

Haven't seen one of these in years!

amazing documentation for a product.

I wonder what font was used, couldn't tell.

I need a time machine.

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