Don’t laugh! This is a serious business! How many of you have been sailing in a brisk headwind heeled over, or a rolling quartering sea, or a seriously lumpy piece of ocean? You go below to relieve yourself, and the boat is bouncing around, maybe heeled over quite far, and that toilet seat is sliding all over the place! Those little plastic spacers on the bottom of all toilet seats are great for keeping the seat off the rim of the toilet bowl. But at sea, the spacers act like slides, and with your weight on the seat, you can be thrown all over the place while seated on the head because the seat moves so much on those plastic spacers! Then, a few weeks or months later, the hinge on the seat cover breaks, and then you either have to find a replacement hinge, or worse still a complete new toilet seat to fit your marine head!
Well, that can all change with a little trick we saw on another boat! It was such a great idea, we immediately took off our toilet seat and made the changes that kept the toilet seat firmly in place, while leaving on those slippery plastic spacers, no matter how much your boat moved around on the water!
It’s so easy! Here is the simple way to cure the “ole slippery sliding toilet seat act”.
On the bottom of the toilet seat, mark the exact places inside the toilet bowl itself where a fiddle would hit the the underneath side of the seat itself. This can be done with a magic marker sticking up from under the toilet seat pushed up against where the inner part of the bowl begins after the rim.
Make up some wood fiddles like shown in the photo, maybe even curve them a bit to follow the outline of your round toilet bowl.
Make the fiddles deep enough, when attached to the bottom of the toilet seat, to fit snugly alongside the inside rim of the toilet bowl.
AdvertisementFasten them with self taping stainless steel screws into the bottom of your toilet seat.
Good idea to glass them over, to keep them clean and hygienic, and to keep them from getting wet.
Now put your toilet seat back on the toilet, making sure the fiddles fit snugly alongside the inner rim of the toilet bowl. And Voila! That seat will NOT be able to move. It is kept in place by the two opposing fiddles inside the bowl!
Advertisement
I know this will work, it made using the head underway so much better!
P.S. That piece of reinforced hose you see sticking out from under the hinge is the drain for the head sink. The sink drains into the toilet rather than having the necessity of another sea cock in the hull!
