Gilmour 9QC Brass Hose Quick Connector Set

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Price: $10.68 $5.50   

Product Feature

• Brass connector set.
• Set includes 1 male and 1 female quick connector.
• Heavy-duty solid brass construction.
• Comfortable rubber grips.
• Lifetime replacement.

Product Description

Gilmour 09qc brass connector set

Gilmour 9QC Brass Hose Quick Connector Set Review

If you're looking for a "quick" summary, it's this: These can't be tightened more than hand-tight, the rubber exterior grips are loose and ill-fitting, and Gilmour's customer service hasn't bothered to reply to my email requesting assistance. If you're ok with only hand-tight connections, they don't seem to leak.

I bought six of these, plus three extra male adapters, hoping to duplicate the success with a pair of brass quick-connect garden hose adapters that I picked up at my local Orchard Supply Hardware years ago, that have served me trouble free for years and years and years.

So I decided to start my collection from scratch, and put my trust in Gilmour -- a Bosch company -- due to the solid reviews I read here on Amazon, and figuring it'd be easy to find compatible pieces years down the road. But, alas, there are shortcomings with these adapters.

(1) These adapters have been "value engineered." Quick-connect fittings (hydraulic and pneumatic, and including my old reliable garden hose fittings I bought at OSH) normally have an O ring deep in the female fitting that seals around the exterior of the male fitting when the two pieces are locked together. This design not only requires the extra few cents for an O ring, but also requires a small groove to be cut into the interior of the female fitting in which the O-ring lives, which increases machining costs. You can see an example of that missing O-ring in the product photos of the following product, where this O-ring can be seen in position around the inside of the female connection.

These Gilmour fittings do away with the O-ring and its associated channel, and instead rely on the blunt end of the male connection to seat against a fatter-than-normal garden hose washer (the rubber washer you'd normally find in a lawn sprinkler or sprayer nozzle).

This is all fine and good when the two quick-connect pieces are assembled and then screwed hand-tight onto the hose/faucet/sprayer. But as the female end is snugged tighter to the hose, the rubber washer is deformed and squeezed into places it shouldn't, thus interfering with the male end being inserted. And if I did manage to make the connection, the two pieces were impossible to release (without unscrewing). My intention was to make these "permanent" installations, with Teflon thread tape and an extra half-turn with a wrench, discouraging them from inadvertently "walking away" over time. But anything other than lightly hand tight causes the problem, and makes the quick connect/disconnect feature unusable.

I tried switching out various other hose washers in place of the ones Gilmour includes in their fittings, including O-ring style and the flat type, and in the end found the best solution to be flipping over Gilmour's washers (which, unlike traditional hose washers, are not symmetrical). But regardless, these fittings don't like to be tightened, and the missing O-ring is the culprit and a feature I'm willing to pay a little extra for.

(2) The rubber "grips" on the exterior of both pieces of the couplings are anything but. They fit loosely to the serrated edges of the coupling, they slip both rotationally and longitudinally, and I really haven't been happy with the fact that I've had to remove the rubber grip pieces to be able to disconnect these hose connections satisfactorily.

Draw that in contrast to the quick-connect couplings I've been using for the past years that have rubber grips pieces on their exteriors. After all this time exposed to the elements, the rubber still adheres to the brass as if it were permanently bonded, and the connect/disconnect action is still easy.

(3) Customer service non-response: I emailed Gilmour from their website "contact us" submission box, explaining the problem I was experiencing, and have yet to receive a response after two weeks. This bothers me because I'm a fan of Bosch tools, and the Bosch name was a large part of my decision to purchase these vs. another brand.

After investing about $80 in a box full of these connections, they're going back to Amazon and I'll shop for a another brand that didn't cheap out on the design and construction. It's frustrating that if I snug them "just right" they'll work, but an extra half-turn to ensure they're cinched securely (and semi-permanently) to the faucet or hose end and they *Don't Work* is simply unacceptable. I'll give Orbit and Power Washer a try, as they have a similar appearance to the old quick connectors I own.

(Update 7/21): I returned the Gilmour connectors, and ordered (and received) the quick connects by Orbit. These appear exactly identical to the old, reliable connectors I purchased at OSH years ago.

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