The plastic sleeve of the cartridge in our bath/shower mixer faucet has crumbled(!) and fallen apart, so – unless there’s some way to get it working without the sleeve? – I need to find a replacement.
The problem is that the shape of the one-piece O-ring on the base of the cartridge is unique/unusual and I can’t find a match. The local plumbing outlets that I’ve tried just shrug and say buy a new unit, but I’d prefer not to do that if at all possible. Any help or suggestions would be appreciated!
The tap is a ‘Caesar’ brand mixer, and it’s about 15 years old. The cartridge seems to be a 40 mm and the part number on the shattered sleeve says HD-40C
What do you mean by “cartridge” and “plastic sleeve of the cartridge”?
I’m not getting what those mean in the context of a mixer faucet and how the not-an-O O-ring fits into that. Are you looking for a replacement O-ring or a replacement sleeve/cartridge?
Maybe a couple more photos would be useful?
It might actually be pretty cheap to just buy a new unit on Shopee or Ruten or wherever. Just looked at a few and there are alright-looking ones available for way under NT$1k.
Thanks for replying! Yeah, it’s the entire cartridge that I’m looking for. It would look exactly like this one – 40毫米陶瓷卡匣冷水龍頭陶瓷閥芯水龍頭gba502 | PChomeUSA 海外代購 – except that instead of the 3 o-rings and two pegs on the base of this one, ours has the joined-up 3-compartment o-ring pattern in the picture I posted.
(The part that’s failed in ours corresponds to the turquoise sleeve/case in the pchome image.)
I was going to say it might be hard tracking down replacement parts for a 15-year-old tap given how many products are available from different manufacturers, but if this is the company they seem to be pretty big and well established, so maybe you could try looking at their current models to see if you can find yours? Or something that looks similar, so you’d at least have a model number of the tap to search for?
Shopee and Ruten didn’t bring anything up for “HD-40C”, but I suppose it’s possible there might be an updated model number for that.
The company’s contact details are also given on the website, so you could try contacting them to ask about replacement parts too.
Thanks yeah, that’s it. The ceramic disk valve is actually inside the blue cartridge, but yeah, that’s the part I need.
I haven’t figured out how to navigate the Caesar website yet, and to be honest I’m not too hopeful because they seem to have stopped making mixer taps and their legacy support seems… poor – but it would definitely be worth trying to contact them.
Ah yes, thank you – I see all the mixer taps now! I’m not sure what I was doing wrong before, but anyway, there they are!
Unfortunately it’s still looking like a bust on the replacement cartridge. However, on the assumption that it’s going to be unobtainable, I have a new plan: find the cheapest generic 40mm cartridge I can get my hands on and cannibalize it for its shell and lever arm. I’ll post again to let you know how it goes. Meanwhile, thanks again for all your help!
I went to a local Caesar outlet and for 160 NT$ I bought one of these – DL02GJ DL02GJ
Then all I had to do was
discard the baseplate (because I’ll be installing to the original baseplate that’s already permanently mounted inside the faucet)
swap out the bottom half of the ceramic valve and replace it with the equivalent piece from the original unit (this is the piece that has the seals with the unique configuration)
rotate all the internal parts except for the top plate by 180 degrees inside the sleeve (this is necessary because the lever in the new cartridge pivots in the opposite direction(!) to the lever in the old cartridge, so I need to reverse that; the top plate needs to stay un-rotated because it uses two stops inside the sleeve to limit the left/right movement of the faucet handle, and for that to work properly, the plate has to be kept in its original rotation)
enlarge one of the registration slots in the sleeve to accommodate the 180 deg rotation so that I can actually mount the thing in the desired orientation. (The unit has asymmetrical registration slots which are designed to prevent the unit from being installed the wrong way round, but in my case I actually need to mount it the ‘wrong’ way round because of step #3).
push/click the new unit into place and reassemble the rest of the faucet
Boom! Sorted!
So yeah, in the end it turned into a nice Sunday afternoon project. The whole process took about an hour once I’d figured out what I needed to do. Though tbh, I wasn’t 100% sure it would work until I actually turned the water back on again and saw that it was all good. Yay!
By the way the faucet in my new place leaks at the valve when I turn the water on, and the water will be restricted for a few seconds and then a torrent comes out. How can I fix this? what part do I need?
