Pulling out your Dremel during plumbing work is probably a mistake. I should have pulled out the WD-40 first, but I didn't. I probably could have gotten the faucet valve off without the Dremel, but I'll never know for sure. What I do know for sure is that no one makes those types of valves anymore.
It started so innocently. I had some extra time between Christmas and New Years, and my bathroom sink faucet was dripping. It seemed like a good time to fix the sink, rather than the beginning of a journey down a dead end tree in plumbing's evolutionary past. A view into an alternative reality that sucks. I knew that the sink was old --- probably 90 years old --- but I hadn't thought through what that meant.
When my wife told me it was a Crane sink, I didn't give it a second's thought, because I'd never heard of Crane. There is a reason you've never heard of Crane sinks --- they're so badly designed for maintenance that it boggles the mind and most people simply junk them. I've been writing software for 31 years, and I've never seen anything in the software world this bad. Except for FIX order state management.
The first problem, which we'd noticed when we looked at the house, was that the stopper didn't work, and hadn't worked since I first touched a computer. Every now and then someone unfamiliar with the house would push it down, and then I'd have to get a knife out to lift it back in place. Forcing repeat pusher downers to get their own knives prevented repeat occurrences. The stopper couldn't be fixed because the pole for the stopper is in the ceramic box on the right. Unlike modern, surviving sink designs, you cannot get to the stopper pull. 
You also cannot get to underneath the faucet, because it is blocked by the same ceramic box that keeps you away from the stopper pull. Instead, the faucet is held against the sink with a butterfly-like anchor that you insert through the hole on the bottom and then screw up. The top hole is for the water supply. Being the first person to view the wing nut in 90 years gave me the same queasy feeling I get when I look at gcc's codebase, and wonder, "Does this really work? But the {tests pass}/{water comes out}." It also turns out that no one --- and I mean no one still alive --- makes plumbing fixtures designed to fit this sink. At one point Mary Anne said "Oh, so it is a four hole sink." No, no it is not. And Mary Anne claims to have realized that, too.
Once I took the faucet off, I was able to pull the whole assembly out:
It looks like something from an Alien movie. The pipe on the right is the supply, and the long hooked rod is what (in some alternate world) moves the stopper up and down.
My offer to buy a 3D printer and print out a new faucet assembly was summarily rejected by Mary Anne.
A new pedestal sink is in our future. 90 years isn't a bad run.
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