SIMPLE DOES NOT MEAN EASY!

No good deed goes unpunished! Just because something is simple, that doesn’t mean it is easy.              

       Last Friday night I emptied the garbage can from under the kitchen sink. When I removed the trash can I noticed that there was a significant amount of water at the bottom of the cabinet. I grabbed a flashlight and found the source of the water. The kitchen sink drain basket had sprung a leak. The gasket had apparently failed.
So, I mopped up the water and left a note for SWMBO telling her that the sink was out of commission until I could effect repairs. Unfortunately I had a church business meeting on Saturday morning so I would not be able to get to the repair(s) until after the meeting, sometime in the afternoon. 
The business meeting ran long and I did not get home until around 1:30 p.m. I ate lunch, talked with my beloved SWMBO and then got to work.
I got my work light, my tools and began. I removed everything from under the sink. I illuminated the underside of the sink to examine the damage and determined that the drain basket, slip nut and nylon gasket at the bottom of the tail piece had to be replaced. The slip nut got cracked somehow. It is real simple to remove the sink basket. You remove the tail piece by unscrewing the slip nut at the top and bottom, then pull it out.

Next thing is removing the drain basket. It is held in place by a brass ring nut. Remove the nut and the gaskets and the basket comes right out...simple, right? As it turns out the ring nut was fused with rust to the drain basket. When I applied torque to loosen the nut, the drain basket turned. Holding the drain basket still with one wrench and trying to turn the ring nut did not work. By the time I had tried everything that I knew to do to loosen the ring nut, I had about six hours and several scraped bleeding knuckles into the job. I quit, cleaned and dressed my knuckles and went to bed.
       The next day being Sunday we had church in the morning and it was Mother's Day so the repairs would have to wait until Monday.

So on Monday, to make a long story short, I used a rotary tool to cut the brass ring nut off. This did the trick. Once I had the old drain basket removed it took about an hour to install the new one and put the sink back into operation. SWMBO was pleased...and that’s what I live for!
So like I said just because something is simple that does not mean it is easy. This  sink repair is a good example of what I mean.