A LITTLE STORY ABOUT A LAWN MOWER

 

My engineer friends and I have fun talking about the fact that none of us has ever bought a lawn mower. We all acquire our lawn mowers the night before garbage pickup or from a friend who can’t make his work.

 

I inherited my first clunker when we bought our house in 1972. It was really about worn out. When my dad came to visit from Pennsylvania in 1978 and had to use it to mow the grass, he decided I needed a new one and bought me a 21 Model 7266 Lawnboy in the spring of 1979. I must admit it was a step up, and since I didn’t buy it myself, I still qualify for the never having bought a lawn mower club.

 

By the way I have an old Toro that I savaged on the way home from work the day before the garbage was to be collected. I use it occasionally for the rough work at the edge of the property.

 

In any case in the summer of 1991, the mower didn’t have much pep, and I decided it would be a good opportunity for my daughter to learn how to do some engine work. We installed a short block in it, and it has been running well ever since that time until recently. Actually I wasn’t sure if it was all the rain or the extra fertilizer I put on the yard, but I seemed to be able to walk faster than the mower could mow.

 

Then we went on a two-week vacation and had a college student stay at our house and of course mow the lawn. When I came home I could tell something was different. The mower sounded different, and it had almost no power. I couldn’t figure out what this kid had done to my prize mower. I checked it out and even put in a new spark plug, but it still had no power.

 

It just so happened that I again had to be out of town and didn’t have much time to mess with the mower so I decided to have a professional lawn repair shop give it a tune up  the first in 24 years. So I looked in the phone book and called the shop nearest my house. The phone rang many times before it was answered by a surly sounding guy. I asked if he could service my mower, and he said they might be able to get around to it in two to three weeks. I thought my grass will be a little tall by then.

 

So I called another shop. They answered the phone promptly and cheerfully and said they could service the mower in three to four days. So I delivered the mower and was pleased with the reception and the explanation of what they were going to do to the mower. On the fourth day I received a call from them saying the mower was ready. They explained what they did to the mower and assured me that it still had plenty of power. There was one problem they didn’t fix. The carburetor has a slight leak when the engine is not running so they instructed me to turn the fuel off when I park the mower. They even put a tag on the mower handle describing what to do. (Actually I had been doing this before taking it to them.) By the way, they might have fixed the leak but there are no parts for this carburetor any more.

 

But the best part of this story is that when I got the mower home and began mowing, it was like a new mower. I couldn’t believe how great it mowed the tall grass. It must be years since it mowed this well.

 

So what are the morals of this story? I guess one is that equipment does need maintenance, and that if I would have had some data, like RPMs, over time I would have noticed the loss of power before it got to a crisis stage. As it was, I didn’t notice the tiny deterioration each time I mowed the lawn. And secondly, it was a real pleasure having a professional fix my mower for the first time. I just wonder if the mower will last another thirty years so I won’t have to ever buy a lawn mower. Maybe I should keep my eye out on garbage days just in case.