Just bought a new house where the master tub drain doesn't seal. I pulled the drain out for comparison at a hardware store, to find one of same size and similar style. Online, my wife found the identical drain, and we discovered that the gasket just needed to be flipped back down in order to seal again, so we're hoping to use the same drain and not need to replace it.
I go to put the drain back in again (which is a center drain) and discovered that, being a center drain, there is a lot of flexibility in the under-tub pipe, so that the pipe bend down when I put any weight on it. This is coupled with the fact that the pipe isn't exactly centered on the tub drain hole, so there's a lot of friction between the drain and the tub when I go to push the drain through the tub hole. The sum total of all of this is that when I try screwing the tub drain in, I end up just pushing the drain pipe down so far that I can no longer screw the drain in, but the drain never ends up threaded for me to be able to twist things together. (Hopefully what I'm trying to say makes sense.)
I have access to some of the under-tub stuff through a small opening in a wall positioned close to one of the corners of the tub. However, there's only a couple inches of clearance between the tub and the floor, and I can't get low enough to see if I even have access to the pipe through this hole (to maybe use a yard stick to try to push the pipe up).
How can I get the drain to screw in to the pipe when the pipe is so flexible?