Broke my drain basket...what are my options?

Factual Questions
1

So, today’s task was simple, go to the hardware store, pick up a new drain basket/stopper and replace the old one, easy enough.

Well, I put the basket wrench down onto the basket and with one turn the bottom of the drain, the part that the basket wrench grabs on to came right off. Okay, so I’ll go in the basement and just unscrew it from down there. That wasn’t an option.

This is your typical tub drain/overflow setup. Mine is the type that you manually open and close the drain right at the drain, it doesn’t have the lever and associated innards…also it’s PVC. On mine, there’s compression fitting between the drain and where it connects to the overflow tube, but even if the pipe is exactly the right length that I could bend the PVC around and pull it apart, the floor joists are to close to be able to spin it.

My thought was to cut the part that goes from the drain to the overflow so that it’s short enough that I can unscrew it, then I can just put a new one it place. But how would I keep the drain basket from spinning with it since I don’t really have anything to grab it with.
I’m glad I only got this far. I got all my stuff ready and said “Nope, I should wait until tomorrow so everything is still open if I ruin something” Luckily the part that broke won’t prevent me from taking a shower in the morning.

2

You will probably wind up using brute force, as in break the Ring holding the basket in. It has been a while, but the tub drain basket should be somewhat like a kitchen sink. The basket is held in with a large washer type ring, then the drain pipe is attached to the lower threaded section of the drain basket.

The way we did it in apartment maintenance was to take a chisel and cut the ring making sure we didn’t hit the tub in any way. Usually wound up cutting through the basket itself, but that is what your trying to replace, I hope.

Once you cut off the ring, you just muscle the remaining basket off the drain pipe hopefully, unscrewing it by hand. If you had the tools needed to do it any other way it is still a two body job. One person in the tub, the other in the basement, holding the ring.

If you have one with the “Shoe” joining the drainpipe and holding the basket in, use a hacksaw to cut the “shoe” http://www.homerepairforum.com/images/uploads/2005-3-25_GLUE_IN_WSTE_OVERFLOW_w550.JPG