Lawn mower stable
Lets ponder lawn mowers;
mowers of all kinds. Big ones and the little ones that cut grass or are
supposed to. I have five of them. Three of them can be sat on and are
supposed to go without pushing. I push them often. You have most likely
seen the advertisements with the semi-dork suburbanite looking over the
horizon for more grass to cut before the sun goes down.
I have
one of those really nice pushing mower with a pull rope that has the
big wheels in the back. The minimum wage salesman at Walmart said that
it would make mowing a breeze. The salesman disappeared quickly when I
asked him two questions. I said "define breeze" and "what expertise do
you have with mowing lots of grass." He was only eighteen years of age
at best with a tuft of I think hair on his chin indicating to me that
he knew almost nothing about cutting hair not to mention cutting grass.
The
fifth one is one of those push rotary reaper manual kind of mowers. My
wife thought it would be cute to have one. She pushed it about two rows
around the yard and the spinning blade hit a stick and stopped the
whole rig like she hit a wall. Now I use it to chase the grandkids
around the yard. They think it is Frank from the
movie Cars. This rotary one cost twice as much as the pull start
one. Something I mention to her every time I move it in the garage and
my unprotected toe gets caught in the reaper.
Currently,
none of the riding mowers are working up to par. Between the
batteries and the belts, I cannot keep any one of them running
properly. All of them have adjustments that were designed by NASA
rocket scientist and you need an alignment tool from the Czech
Republic to keep the deck level. If you happen to get one mowing and
running at the same time, you still have to get it in gear and adjust
the blade angle so that you do not throw palm frond chips through the
screen on the porch. The only enjoyable part is watching the cats, dogs
and horses run like hell from the machine commonly known as "piece of
shit".
The pull start mower with the big wheels is a true
gem. It was easy to start and it did mow well. After I used it the
third time it started surging. I got out the owners manual and
I could not find anything about surging. In the Korean section, I
gleaned something about an air filter so I decided to check that.
Three screws and seven different screw driver hex bits later, I pulled
out a perfectly clean air filter and dropped a screw down into the guts
of this fine machine. It would not start any longer and I pulled on the
pull rope so many times it broke, smashing
my knuckles into the rotary push mower.
In fact all of my riding
lawn mowers surge the same way. When the engine is on a surge at the
high revolution end, the grass cuts too low and when the engine almost
quits running and sputters it does not cut at all. The yard looks like
a checkerboard. And grass catchers? There is not enough time to go
into grass catchers only I will say that I dismantle them as soon as I
get them out of the box. I get out the hack saw and cut that silly
bar off the bottom of the deck. What the hell is that for anyway?. All
it does is keep the grass from going into the catcher. They all surge.
Why? I concluded after much cussing and praying that it was Satan's
doing. God may not give you more than you can handle but I question
that dogma when it comes to lawn mowers. I can barely lift an eighty
pound bail of fresh alfalfa but I can discus a sixty pound mower
about thirty yards with no foot fault.
Lawn mower memories
When
I was a kid, I used to cut grass for money. Dad let me use the old lawn
mower that had been holding up the Jon Boat in the back yard since
before I was born. The deck was rusted, one wheel was missing, two
wheels were wobbling like a penguin. the blade was eleven inches long
on one side and on the other side it was bent down like a golf club
giving me about eight inches total. Even though I could read on the
deck that it was a twenty two inch cut mower, I could not use that in
my advertising because this one only had nineteen inches at best. On
the plus side, if I ran through the yard at a high rate of speed, it
left a really cool spirograph pattern in the grass. I mowed sand,
grass, nails and construction sites and this mower never sputtered or
surged. NEVER.
The piston shaft tried to explode out of the side
of this trouper. I patched the big hole on the engine block with some
Fiberglas insulation I stole from the back of the dryer, a piece of
bathroom tile, some duck tape and a guitar string that I found on a
guitar in the living room. It was almost a year before mom asked about
that one. I should have been working on a story all that time because
"I don't know" did not fly. Anyway, I got eight more lawns out of that
mower after that repair. It never sputtered or SURGED once. Though like
in the great song, "Smoke on the Water", "it died with an awful
sound".
When I got home, dad asked me about the mower and I said
I was unemployed thinking that would squelch his interest. I do not
know why it would have, thinking back to that day. "Bud, where is your
mower?" "At the bottom of the canal" I said enthusiastically thinking
once again that might lead him off the track. "Nancy, you need to come
listen to this one". Nancy was my mom. Her name was McGill, she called
herself Lil, but my dad always called her Nancy. "Go ahead Bud", he
said. Bud was what he called me when he was curious about my doings and
goings on.
"Well, the mower finally bit the big one", I said.
"While I was dragging it home, I ran into Bobby and he said him and
Larry could fix anything. So I went out on his back porch to cool off
and I heard him and Larry banging and laughing and I heard the ole girl
try to come to life one last time. There was a final bang and what
apparently was a small explosion and the next thing I see, Larry is
pulling the mower behind his bike now completely engulfed in flames. Bobby is running after him laughing. They
came around the side by Mr. Delmon's eight million dollar plastic fence
lighting it on fire as they went. Larry had a crazed look on his face
as he headed straight off the dock into the canal. Bike, mower and all.
Bobby went right in after him. It was a sight." "Why do you ask?" My
dad said he had found a wheel down the street by the post office and he
thought it might help if my mower had four wheels.
This point is worth repeating, it never surged. NEVER.
thanks to Dimview for editing help and support