Week of Woes and Sorrows
I’m having a rough week with machines.
First, the often mentioned and much-maligned lawn mower. It’s a John Deere L130 riding mower – yeah, a riding mower, but we’ve got nearly five acres to mow and pushing it just takes too long. Honest. Anyone who knows me well also knows I’d rather use a push mower for the exercise – stop laughing! Stop that! It might be true.
Okay, that’s a baldfaced lie. I hate exercise. And yard work. My preferred method of lawn care would be a few gallons of gasoline and a simple yet effective home-made flame-thrower, used once a month until first frost, but the wife won’t hear of it.
Enter the riding mower. Now, reasonable people, if asked to design a mowing machine, would come up with some straightforward assemblage of wheels and blades and an engine, and that would be that. You’d get on the thing, start it, perform the dreary deed, and be done with it.
Instead, I have a nightmarish contraption comprised of oddly-placed pulleys and a serpentine drive belt that weaves in and out of not just the three dimensions we can perceive but an additional seven that can only be seen by lying beneath the wretched machine with your head twisted a full 180 degrees backward and your arms pulled out of their sockets. Then, and only then, can one begin to understand how the belt can be in not one but six places all at the same time.
Now, the laughing lads down at NAPA Auto Parts will gleefully install the belt for you – for one hundred and fifty dollars. Now, even though the wife and I are wealthy beyond all compare and I routinely light my hundred dollar bills with thousand dollar bills, a hundred and fifty bucks to put a belt on a lawn mower is beyond the pale. No, quoth I, this time, I’m handling it.
Anyway, last week, during a modest two hundred degrees F cold snap, the mower started throwing belts. Run for a few minutes, throw the belt. Frank crawls under the thing, which is dripping with freshly-cut poison ivy and still-warm doggie poop, and replaces the belt.
Mow, throw, repeat.
Finally I tore into the beast, determined to rectify this mechanical malfeasance.
There were pulleys. And clutches. And tensioners. And timers. And of course the amazing multidimensional drive belt, which by the way is also found deep in the bowels of Dr. Who’s Tardis, beneath a sign that reads NOT EVEN TIME LORDS CAN SERVICE THIS. I could tell by the way the belt whipped about like a meth-crazed python that something was wrong, but what?
I disassembled it all, and decided that one of the pulleys wasn’t properly affixed to the mower deck. I tried to tighten it, and couldn’t, and quickly discovered that the bolt was stripped for about a quarter of an inch halfway down its length.
I popped some washers on it to take the bad threads out of play and tightened it down. The belt spun smoothly, weaving in and out of existence like a derivative banker’s dream.
And it mowed for about ten minutes before it snapped in half.
Marvelous.
That was also the day the satellite receiver started flaking out. That comes into play later.
So I had to get a new belt. Back To NAPA Auto Parts, where they grudgingly admit that yeah, they might sell belts, and then again they might not. Why anyone finds it amusing to be coy about such things remains a mystery to me. It turned out they did sell belts, but they wanted to play an odd game of ‘We’ll give you a belt at random off the wall, and you tell us if it should happen to fit,’ so I went elsewhere. Finally, I found a belt.
So that’s what I did on Memorial Day. To put a new belt on, as opposed to just slipping off a belt that has flopped loose, you have to remove the entire mower deck. Which seems simple enough, until you realize the mower has come quietly to life and wants to kill you.
And it can, too. It waits until you’ve got your hands and arms under it and then it lets a cotter pin fly out and it drops some enormous chunk of jagged, tetanus-infested steel come crashing down on you.
And it snickers when you yell.
I finally wrest the mower deck from its cleverly-conceived mounts, and I get the new belt on. I manage to get the thing put back together with no more than twenty percent blood loss, and within moments I’m back under the Mississippi sun, mowing away, still wishing I had my flamethrower.
Can you guess what comes next? Can you?
Go ahead.
Yep. The worn bolt managed to strike again, reducing the belt’s motion to a mere three dimensions and mocking my efforts to be done with the blasted thing.
So it’s off with the entire deck again, and back to town on a long and desperate search for a rare, nearly mythical metric bolt and some means to secure it in place, since the threaded receptacle on the mower deck is also damaged.
Most towns have at least one old-school hardware store that still smells of machine oil and weed-killer and is staffed by people who know how to solder copper pipes and set the gaps on spark plugs and load a nail gun. In Oxford, that store is Sneed’s Ace Hardware, and that’s where I headed. In minutes we had not only figured out how to fix the pulley but we’d found the exact replacement bolt and the other sundry items needed to make it work.
Back to the mower. On with the parts. On with the belt. On with the deck.
Finally, after much cajoling, I finished mowing, a scant four hours behind schedule.
Which still left some time to run the bushhog. So I fired up the ancestral family tractor, a venerable Massey Fergussen 230 that’s nearly as old as I am. I managed to get a small portion of the front cut when the ‘hog choked on a stand of Johnson grass and the tractor, instead of just pushing through, went dead.
The patch of grass was itself choked with an invisible tangle of cast-off electric fence wire. The bushhog was immobilized.
And the tractor was dead. Out in the middle of a big hot field.
So off I go, to gather tools and engage in a brief interlude of colorful narrative. There’s nothing like rolling around in the middle of a field trying to cut tangled steel wire free from a big nasty set of cutting blades. The snakes were, I imagine highly amused at the spectacle.
I got enough wire cut off to try the tractor again. Nada. Not so much as a mutter when I turned the key.
Did I mention it was hot?
Well, it was. I had to just start checking everything. I knew the battery was good, because I’d just charged it. It started just fine earlier, so I didn’t think the starter was dead. But I couldn’t get a hint of action from the key.
I wound up starting with the battery and removing the cables and cleaning everything…still nothing. Checked the fuses. All good. Removed the cable from the starter, cleaned it, replaced it, tried again.
It fired right up.
Now how the starter cable went from perfectly fine to utterly useless in the span of an hour I don’t know, but it did. So I try to fire up the bushhog again, and it still won’t turn, and now I discover the top retaining bolt of the three-point hitch is just…gone.
Vanished.
It’s a big huge bolt with a big huge nut, and it was secure when I started. I would’ve needed a wrench and a few good whacks to loosen it, but somehow it worked itself free and vanished in the weeds.
So I haul it all back to house and crawl back under it and free the wire and fashion a suitable replacement bolt. And by then it’s late and I’m starving and I say to myself ‘Self, let’s eat,’ so I did.
And when I settle down later than night to drift off to sleep with a bit of TV, I get SIGNAL LOST ON TUNER 1/TUNER 2 instead of mind-numbing TV fare.
So I rise, and I start working on that. I’ve installed more than a dozen satellite systems. I installed this one. I’m good at it. Problems? I can fix them.
That was Monday, and it’s Wednesday night, and the signal loss issue still mocks me.
Machines, I I hath offended thee, I am sorry. Please, let us once again live in harmony and peace, for if I don’t get regular fixes of ‘The Daily Show’ my skin starts turning yellow and my knees grow lush patches of hair.
Now watch this PC crash before I even get this posted…