Notes from Maine - 2024/06/16

The lawnmower is working again. Last year, Mom and I rebuilt the self-propelled mechanism and fixed up the rear baffle and shield. This year, when it was running rough, Mom took it apart so we could clean the carburetor. The carb was clean, although I noticed that the muffler was beginning to come off the mount, so I fixed that up. 

Lawnmowers used to be a mystery to me. If they didn’t run, I would poke here and there and try to make them limp along. I wasn’t allowed to take them to a shop for repair. That’s against my upbringing. My father was a savant when it came to small engines. As a kid, on Sunday I might wake to find the dining room table covered in newspaper. There would be a jar of gasoline with mysterious metal parts soaking and twinkling in the morning light. You could ask questions but you would only get back vague answers as his hand worked to assemble or disassemble. There would be occasional outbursts of foul language and hurled tools, so it was best not to stick around. But by the end of the day, the mower would be running again.

One year for Father’s Day I gave Dad a framed photo. It was me, my sister, and my brother playing in the leaves at the curb in front of our house. I was probably two or three years old in the photo. My siblings are both older. Dad’s eyes lit up when he saw the picture. 

“Aw, man, this is really neat,” he said, holding the frame in both hand. “Wow.”

I smiled.

Then he said, “Really neat. I wonder what happened to that car.” 

He wasn’t looking at us kids, he was looking at the 1949 flat head Chrysler that he bought for $25 and fixed up. 

Later, when Dad became too wrapped up in his lawyering to do car repairs, Mom took auto shop class at the high school. She bore the weight of car repair after that. Her work t-shirt read, “Mrs. Goodwrench.” Eventually she was offered a job at the Ford place, but she turned it down. 

My brother has always repaired engines and vehicles. His knowledge is deep and professional, since he acquired it working in or adjacent to shops and dealerships most of his life. 

A decade ago, I decided to instruct myself in small engine repair. I knew only the basics, but I had the internet and YouTube to guide me. It’s not so difficult these days. You type in the problem, figure out a better way to word it, discover the correct names for the things that are failing, type it in again, and you’ll instantly be led to the wrong answer. 

My friend Dave was over one day and we were filling up a tire with ether. Some YouTube video told us that we could mount the tire on a rim without equipment if we could just make it explode. The first time, nothing happened. Dave took the can of ether from me and said, “I think you gotta really shoot it in there.” I shrugged. We were both operating from the knowledge gained from one three-minute video. The guy in the video was holding a can of beer as he worked, but I didn’t think that was a necessary component of the procedure. On the second try, when Dave dropped the match, the world went white for a moment. Blinking, I asked, “What was that?”

“What was what?” Dave asked. He was poking at his ear, trying to make it work again.

I shook my head. “What hit the barn?”

“Hey, I think it worked!” 

The ether inside the tire had exploded, expanding it and setting the bead on the rim—mission accomplished. But we had failed to take into account that it was a studded tire. When the ether exploded it had stunned us into twilight consciousness and also sent little metal studs flying in every direction. Luckily, none had hit either of us, but we found a few embedded in the wall of the barn. 

I try to be a little more careful than that when I’m working on engines. I never mess with the mower blade unless the spark plug wire is removed. In fact, I try to never mess with the blade at all. By some miracle, I still have all my fingers and I want to keep things that way.

On Thursday, I was out in the garage trying to make the mower work again. After Mom and I cleaned the carb and fixed the muffler (more importantly the linkage for the choke thermostat that’s connected to the muffler), it had run until I hit tall grass and then it died. YouTube informed me that the key for the flywheel can sheer which upsets the spark timing, so that’s what I was investigating.

My brother pulled in on his way home from CostCo.

“Did you check the blade?” he asked.

“For what? I have a timing problem,” I said. 

“Where did you get this mower?” he asked me.

“Home Depot, fifteen years ago.”

A look of disdain settled on his face and then he cocked his head. 

“You bought it?”

I rolled my eyes. “Yes.”

“We don’t buy mowers,” my brother said, narrowing his eyes. In my family, you’re supposed to get lawn mowers when someone leaves them out as trash or you can salvage them from the dump. Other people buy them. We just fix and use them.

“Yeah, well, Dad used to soak parts in gas,” I said. “Parts that got dirty from gas, he was soaking in gas to clean them. Tell me how that makes sense?”

“Gas is a solvent,” my brother said. “And he wasn’t cleaning the gas, he was cleaning the varnish.”

“Where does that ‘varnish’ come from?” I demanded.

“Old gas,” my brother admitted.

When I went to the toolbox, my brother lifted the mower (without removing the spark plug wire) and discovered that the blade was loose. The welded key on the blade driver assembly (part number 106-3987, if you’re in the market) had sheared and so the blade was able to move on its spindle a little. It was slipping just enough to upset the engine timing. In a small lawnmower, the blade is essentially part of the flywheel. Its rotating mass is crucial to the momentum of the engine until the spark plug fires again to send it around once more. 

My YouTube information was wrong. I ordered the new part and two days later I finished cutting the grass. 

Before he left, my brother asked, “Don’t you have a shop full of riding mowers?”

At one time, I did. I would pull them from the dump or from people’s yards, fix them, and then release them back out into the world. It was a good learning experience. At one point, I kept three riding mowers going, just in case. 

“I’m down to just Alice’s,” I said. In 2015, I heard about a woman named Alice who had an old riding mower rusting in her garden. It had died years before and her repair person couldn’t move it because the hydrostatic transmission was locked on. You can’t tow a hydrostatic transmission—it will ruin it. I had to lift the back end and wrestle it to my trailer an inch at a time. But now it’s the best riding mower I’ve ever had. 

“Why don’t you use that to mow?” my brother asked.

“Because this one was broken,” I said, gesturing down at the little push mower.

He understood. It was never about the lawn. I don’t care what the grass looks like. But I couldn’t have a broken mower in my garage. It’s against my upbringing.