Published: Sun 30 September 2007
By dwarner
In 2007 .
tags: Home Lawn mower
So a couple weeks ago I told you about some problems (I created) with
our lawn
mower .
Unfortunately, things have gotten worse.
Well, I guess it didn't have far to go from "potentially dead" to
"dead", so it's not too surprising.
My father-in-law was able to get the mower running last week after I
broke it, so I was hopeful that I might get another year or two out of
it. That hope was killed quickly when I started the mower up yesterday
morning.
I started the mower, and a ton of smoke poured out - that was expected.
What wasn't expected was the really bad knocking. I decided to try it
out anyway and made about half a trip around the house when it suddenly
stopped with a "klunk".
"Okay, I hit something," I thought. Pushed it back to the garage (the
starter is was still being a pain) and took the starter of to shim it
better, and "Oh - that's not fixable." I saw a nice crack in the block.
It wasn't leaking oil very badly, so my Dad and I pushed it into the
shed to deal with it later while I push-mowed the yard. Came back to
drain the oil and found that most had already drained out of a supposed
crack in the bottom of the block.
So, the mower is definitely shot (despite my Dad suggesting that I could
get it welded - I think I've had it with this mower for now).
I'm looking for a replacement, but I'm not sure what type of
replacement. I wasn't really sold on getting a riding mower to begin
with since I'm used to push-mowing about a half-acre and can do our
1/3-acre lot in a little over an hour -- the riding mower wasn't a very
big time saver. I'm considering a larger and self-powered push-mower;
does anyone have any experience with the newer models and how well they
do? The biggest reason we got the riding mower was to make mowing easier
for Tiff to do, so it would have to accomplish that (ie, it wouldn't be
able to make her keep up with it if it were a self-propelled). Thoughts?