Loosening a Moen Faucet
[handyman
trick
]
At the end of March, the faucet in our half bath was failing. Cold water wouldn’t flow when the level was turned. I tried replacing the cartridge in the handle, but it didn’t fix anything. Time for replacement. Finding a replacement faucet was easy, but learning the secrets to removing the faucet were not. This post is to record how I learned the dark secrets that allowed me to remove the faucet and complete its replacement without the assistance of a professional. TL;DR: Ask YouTube and YouTube shall provide.
The faucet was a Moen Castle B, a discontinued faucet. (I learned this by calling Moen. They were very helpful.) It was easy enough for me to figure out how to remove the handles, and I was able to remove a cover from the top of the spout, but I was not able to figure out how to loosen the faucet from the sink itself. There were no nuts or bolts to loosen. It seemed as if the faucet clung to the sink by magic.
For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out how to loosen the faucet! So I turned to Google. After come work, I found this guy’s web page: Terry Love. Linked on the page are two videos that pointed me in the proper direction. Here’s the first of them.
After watching this, I grabbed my set of long alan wrenches, found the one that seated without play down the ‘stopper pull’ shaft at the rear of the spout, and I turned. It quickly became clear that I was on to something. Shortly, there was play in the spout. It was loosening from the sink top. And then it was off.
That did the trick!
I write about that here because I was so taken aback that there was no evidence on the spout itself that the faucet had this tightening/loosening mechanism. Unfortunately, I didn’t take time to examine the spout to see how this mechanism worked, so it’s still something a mystery to me. But that doesn’t matter. I was able to change the faucet out without asking a pro for help.