Tonight I found myself up against a most adverse challenge. The bathtub wasn’t draining. This has happened before and all I had to do in the past was to remove the coverplate and reattach the linkage to the trip lever. It can come off everynow and then, it’s a plunger tub drain.
Unfortunately tonight when I tugged on the linkage the whole thing came out, as it must’ve come undone from the plunger that stops the drain. I was looking behind the tub to see if I could remove pipe to get to the plunger, but due to the constraints of the room I had for access that wouldn’t be done without some modification to the closet.
So after much searching I found a good old fashioned wire hanger. Bent it into something that I hoped would be able to grab the plunger from the pipe and prepared to go fishing for the plunger. Amazingly on my first try I hooked the plunger and pulled it out and reconnected everything. I’m going to have eventually buy a new drain since the trip lever seems broken, but for the time being the drain works!