SPRINKLER TALK FORUM - You Got Questions, We've Got Answers

It turned out to be a piece of cake....once I knew what I was trying to do. I thought I was supposed to take bonnet off, then unscrew actuator. I didn't know that "unscrewing the actuator" meant unscrewing whole top of valve without removing bonnet first. Then it unscrewed easily, no wrenches needed, there was no glue, I screwed in top of new valve, and it was a five minute operation. Well, I stopped to take pictures, and also had to remove the solenoid of valve next door to make room to unscrew bad valve's actuator, so more than five minutes, but whoo-hoo, no need to cut pipe. Thanks to Wet Boots and Mr Fix-it for your help.

That actuator will unscrew from the valve body. I can see the date code on your existing valves. They aren't that old. Use two wrenches so you don't snap the pvc pipe.
Some actuators can be repaired without removing them but the valve in question you can't.
It's a 5 minute job. Unscrew it counter clockwise. Turn HARDER. Nothing to it.

I cannot even remove the actuator from the new valve. I guess the old valve needs to be cut off the pipe. I don't understand why they made this valve so you can remove bonnet, and yet you are not be able to replace just diaphragm/spring or whole actuator assembly. What was supposed to be easy, ten minute repair of torn diaphragm now will be a full valve replacement.

Nothing revolutionary there. Those are all actuators threaded into a body, every last one of them. If you are unable to remove the actuator from the valve that's troubling you, then you have absolutely no other choice but to replace the entire valve. (And don't beat yourself up over it, someone might have glued the old one in place)

And if you do successfully remove the old actuator, you will see that an actuator can't be serviced with a diaphragm replacement while it is still threaded into the antisyphon body.

I dug out my old Photobucket account, and uploaded the pictures to there, and used the URLs from there. Here are the pictures again. The first pic is of the valve before I took the bonnet off, second pic is of the bonnet, third is of the valve without the bonnet, fourth through sixth pics are of new valve. Again, I don't see any way to remove the actuator assembly from lower body of valve, no seams, no threads. I suppose someone could undo the nut on underside of actuator, but that defeats the goal of not cutting pipe to replace the assembly.

Try Tinypic.com for a free upload (you might have to endure a brief ad - this seems to be a random thing for me, where they want to be sure that their service isn't being used by a bot, and the usual 'Captcha' gateway is replaced by a short commercial that ends revealing some words for you to type - I haven't seen any ads or Captcha's lately, so maybe my own computer is now being recognized by Tinypic as not being a bot)

The free image upload results in a column of results, and you click then copy the one for forum postings, and paste it into the message box here.

Hmmm, the pictures didn't get uploaded. I used a Windows folder location as the URL, is there another way to get the pictures uploaded to this forum?

These pictures show the valve before I took the bonnet off, the bonnet, and the valve with bonnet off.

Every 311 valve I've ever seen has an actuator threaded into a body. If you can't unthread the actuator from the existing body, post a photo of the valve, and prepare to replace the entire valve (it can be done)

Clarification: by "no threads" and "single sealed unit", I meant there is no apparent division between actuator assembly and lower body of valve, and no apparent way to unscrew assembly. Obviously there are threads in lower body where it is joined via adapter to the pipe. I can remove the six bonnet screws, remove bonnet, metering rod, etc., and see top of actuator assembly, but cannot remove the assembly itself from valve body. Is it meant to be removable? How?