The Moen sink faucet in our black bathroom (so named because of its black tile, white trim, and gray floor) began piddling a few days ago, which seemed odd: Moen says it has a good-for-your-lifetime ceramic valve. So I took it apart, extracting an impressive vector of internal parts in the process.
The “notch” that indicates the hot-cold alignment isn’t particularly obvious, but evidently forward corresponds to the usual hot-on-the-left plumbing:
The retainer clip holding that white stop sleeve in place requires a bit of tweaking from a small pointy probe, but after you expose the hole in that notch the clip comes out easily enough:
With all the frippery out of the way, then “Using pliers, pull the cartridge out of the body by the stem”, which simply did not work for me. No matter what, the cartridge body didn’t budge:
There’s nothing about turning / unscrewing the transparent (looks black here) shell around the stem, so I didn’t try.
Putting enough of the parts back together to keep the cartridge from blowing out in my face (even if I can’t remove it, it’ll certainly blow out on its own), the faucet valve worked fine. You’re supposed to turn the gray pivot retainer 1/4 turn beyond hand tight, which compresses a wavy washer under the retainer. The retainer had been quite loose when I dismantled the faucet, which suggests that either it hadn’t been tightened at the factory or had worked itself loose. That would tend to hold the handle up just a bit, perhaps enough to prevent the valve from completely closing.
After snugging that retainer down tight and reassembling everything, the faucet worked perfectly: happy dance!
I removed the nozzle aerator and found a surprising amount of grit for something that’s downstream of the whole-house water filter and softener:
Cleaned that out and it’s all good again.
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 