We're re-organizing washing machines between the two laundry rooms. Specifically, we're selling the old-but-hardly-used Kenmore 70 Series top-,loading washer from the downstairs laundry room, moving the shiny new Frigidaire high-capacity front-loading washer down from the upstairs laundry room to the downstairs laundry room, then getting rid of the almost-worn-out Whirlpool gas dryer from the upstairs laundry room. The upstairs laundry room will then become solely my workshop, which will give me room to set up the other Gorilla rack and my reloading bench. (The reloading bench is going to need some rebuilding, but that's another story.)
Anyway, as part of all this process, I'm making some plumbing changes in the downstairs laundry room. There is not, to my knowledge, one single stopcock ANYWHERE in the plumbing in this house, except for the main water line into the house, which means you can't work on any water line anywhere without shutting off all water to the house first. To make matters worse, the washer hookups in the downstairs laundry room had cheap plastic compression-fitting valves bodged onto copper pipe and not even properly tightened. (Not surprisingly, they'd obviously been seeping.) Now, there are stopcocks at the pipe entry to enable shutting off the complete washer hookup stands without interrupting water to the rest of the house. Above those, at about top-of-the-washer level, is a proper washer hookup valve, with a single lever to shut off hot and cold water simultaneously, and about a foot above that, separate hot and cold hose faucets should we need to hook up a hose there. All of these are proper bronze 90°-throw ball valves. The tees and the necessary pipe adapters are all soldered joints.
Now, finally, we get to why this all drove me crazy. You see, you can't buy tin-lead based plumbing solder any more, or decently aggressive fluxes. The solder is lead-free stuff that's apparently composed of tin, copper and selenium, and the flux is water-based zinc-chloride stuff that's politically correct, non-polluting, cleans up with water ... and does a crappy job. The solder itself wasn't so bad, although it didn't flow as well as traditional tin-lead solder; but between that and the next-to-useless flux, half my solder joints had to be redone before I even put water into the pipes because it was obvious at a glance they were bad joints. Three of the joints had to be redone twice — pulled completely apart, thoroughly cleaned up, and done over. The flux isn't anywhere even close to aggressive enough. Probably half the problem is the flux boiled off the joint long before it got anywhere near soldering temperature.
I understand the desire to get lead out of plumbing solder. And I understand the desire to use cleaner fluxes. But you know what? If your solution doesn't work, you haven't solved the problem. And this crap doesn't work.
