Full Steam Backwards?

How I ever got involved in the apparently innocent and simple process of  installing a steamer at the kitchen. A steamer it an awkward gigantic impervious hunk of steel that creates loads of steam and pressure which infuses into three special pots for cooking food, killing three birds with one stone.  At first glance, not having a personal relationship with it yet, I was impressed, but now I mush say my esteem for it and its steam for me have plummeted.  You can only fix it so many times before your feelings change.  For three weeks we have been trying to make this showy sieve stop leaking. Here is a taste of what we go through.

Find the leaks, take them apart, stay calm.  And another thing is, just do not expect it to go back on the same way it was before, that does not always happen for some reason.

Teflon tape was the most effective method I found. Just make sure you have plenty of it on there.  These pipes do not always fit in the fittings.  It is like all the fittings are just barely big enough that the pipe is not snug when screwed in and just small enough that the pipe will not slip out, which means you need an almost inexhaustible supply of Teflon. Just for an example, I wrapped a 32 foot roll of Teflon on just one joint and it still leaks.

Frustration is very much a part of our work, but luckily the steamer was never damaged more than the damage it kept doing to itself.  Sadly, the same cannot be said of the belligerent so called plumber. I have come out with a couple new battle wounds.

This circumlocutory den of never ending leaks and problems has almost become my home. Entire days have been thrown away to the caprices of the spoiled steamer's tantrums of insubordination.

Half the fun it is the waiting. I have become a professional waiter. For the steamer to warm up and create enough steam to test the leaks, we usually wait anywhere from a half hour to 45 minutes.  It would have been nice if there had been a breeze to shoot at least, but breezes are also denied us here.

Then the same story replays over again like a bad nightmare returns in the night. Another leak!!  If it is not the one that we just tried to fix then it is a different leak. Where they come from, nobody knows. I think we have conscripted the service of every tool we own to the solution of these problems but to no avail.

It is bad when you have to replace old parts, imagine replacing new parts.  I have done both, more times than one, through the course of this ordeal. Our biggest, but not only, problems with this is not that it takes time to buy the parts, but somehow the new pieces are never the same size as the old ones.  That is what I call getting the short end of the deal.

By March 30, 2013, on which fateful day we took these pictures, I had reached my wit's end and had to sound retreat.  After regrouping and organizing with a little bit of thought we might be able to create a effective strategy to out do this illusive trouble maker.
The morals of this story are too many to list, too many to remember, and too much for one person to take.  Neither has the overall moral been learned, as the overall end has not been attained. Unless we admit defeat...NEVER! Giving up actually sounds tempting.
Never fear for this is David your Post Host, and who knows if I will survive this next bout with the incorrigible contraption, but you never know when, or if, I will post again. AND THIS IS NO APRILS FOOLS JOKE, but the cold, hard, heartless, unforgiving truth.