Hey speedball1 (and anyone else interested)... after some thought, I decided to pull the toilet up again before commiting to caulking it down. At very least I thought I should jam lots of plastic toilet shims under the flange to support it in the event the toilet comes to rest on it.

Attached are two pictures of flange I posted about earlier (probably should have done this in the first place). The first pic has a 2-1/4" closet bolt for scale. The gap between the bottom of the fange and the floor is 3/16" in the front and back, 1/4" on the sides (warped due to previous owner over-tightening). Max height off the floor is 3/4" on the sides. The second pic shows the seams visible when looking down the drain. There are some knicks and gouges in the vertical pipe - maybe the flange isn't original? I'm *pretty* sure there is some blue cement oozing out of the seam between the flange and vertical pipe, but I don't have a dentist's mirror or anythink like that to see really well.

Anyway, mounting the toilet on this flange requires a lot of shims. The space between the floor and toilet is up to 1/2", and the toilet rests entirely on shims (doesn't touch the floor anywhere). What's really frustrating is that the floor is perfectly level around the flange. I'd like to replace it, at the proper height, but I'm not eager to bust up any concrete.

Could the flange be cut/ground out?
Since it may be a replacement flange, would it be unwise to even try?
Am I being paranoid about re-seting the toilet on the existing flange?

Thanks a lot for the help.
Andrew

Attached Images

  

speedball1

Am I looking at a inside flange? The blue stuff that you see is PVC primer.

ALarkin

The blue primer is in the seam between the 3" ID vertical pipe coming and an elbow that goes under the slab (this seam is about 2-1/2" below floor level). The bottom edge of the flange doesn't have any primer visible, but you can see it above the primered seam (it's about 1" below floor level).