triumphal meniscus

Second attempt at posting this in the hope that I'll get it written up within the five-day limit...

<= 5 days later

Hurrah:

After picking a replacement shower whose information panel depicted it as having a water-entry point in almost the same placed as the broken shower's water-entry point I was somewhat annoyed to discover that the new shower had a downward-pointing inlet compared to the old shower's sideways-pointnig swivellable inlet which appeared to have come with an optional second 90° elbow. I was further irritated by the soldered joint converting the microbore coming down from the spur pipe in the loft into 15mm (the better to fit the 15mm-compression end of the came-with-the-old-shower elbow) which looked very fragile when trying to undo the 90° elbow from the pipe in order to establish what might be done to link the pipe with the new shower. I'd thought a braided flexible 15mm-compression-to-15mm-compression would be good for connecting one downward-pointing pipe to another a couple of centimetres away but the resultant wide-radius loop of braided pipe wouldn't fit within the confines of the shower enclosure. Mounting the shower a few inches to the right and stick a pair of elbows between the feed and inlet (just fitting within the shower enclosure) was the get-things-working-quickest solution, required no buying of blowtorches (though using compression joints in plumbing always feels a bit like using nails in carpentry would if I didn't avoid them) but which would require and eventual fix of the exposed-missing-tiles where the old shower had been, despite it being more usual to mount showers on top of tiles rather than tiling up to their edges. After checking that the slow drip through the imperfect stopcock in the loft wasn't resulting in any leaks from the four new joints (resulting in the meniscus above) everything was eventually connected and only required a slight re-tightening once mains pressure water was re-introduced.