Another country maintenance story

       Just a report to say it happened to me.

            The subject is my Sabre riding lawn mower. It is about 11 years old, made by John Deere in a non-union plant in Tennessee at the time, or so the story goes. Anyway, I still get my parts through John Deere, mostly drive belts.

            And it was like 5 steps backward, 1 step forward.

            First, I had to put in a new battery after nursing the old one for a year. In fairness it is a 4 year battery that I got 6 years out of. That took some days. Plus I had to figure out whether the connections were metric or english. Turns out they were english.

            Then I had to renavigate all the safety switches to get the thing to run, which I did yesterday after trial and error. Some of the switches had become intermittent.

            Then after mowing around an acre or two, I screwed up and sucked in an old bed cover the yard dogs had drug out into the yard, and it clogged up the whole thing. To add insult to injury, this cover I used to pork under with a favorite girlfriend. And my yard dogs had dragged it out, I guess. It was wet and soggy, and I thought I had avoided it during mowing.

            So then things went downhill from there.

            The new battery charger would not work today, and after some more trial and error, I figured out the building was off line, so I switched to another building and all worked just fine. In the meantime, I went through some extension cords, too, just to prove it was the building and not the cord or new charger.

            After trying to clear the blockage, I decided I had to just cut it out in the mowing deck. So I went to get my tractor out to help lift the lawn mower and deck enough to cut out the blockage. Well, I had to search around a while to find the chain to hook to the tractor bucket and lawn mower. I had used the chain to haul a large tire from my TVA line to my back yard in order to do some tire gardening, and had forgotten all that. Well, after some more time, I "remembered" all that, too.

            So then I just came back to my cottage to take a break, and drink a beer. It is a nice spring day where I live. I still have to clear the blockage and resume mowing, but have long since learned in my past that sometimes taking a break may help things in the long term. Hope springs eternal, at least I hope so.

            And all I want to do is mow the stupid grass while I get a weather break.