Lawn equipment maintenance - not sure where it will end up.....

So unless you are a condo or are an apartment dweller or can afford to have someone take care of your lawn you most likely have a couple of lawn related devices that need maintenance every year.  I have a number of items, the oldest, and most reliable, is a little 20” push mower that I bought brand new in 1991 for 79 bucks.   I also have a Snapper, with hydrostatic drive, a 38” deck and powering all that is 16 horse Briggs and Stratton industrial/commercial single cylinder engine, it is a 1997 model.  I also have a Troy Built Stick edger, that is a piece of shit but I can’t get it to stop working completely so I can’t discard it – yet.  I have a gas powered hedge trimmer as well, an old lawn-boy model that needs some work right now, it is about 12 years old.  I also have a backpack blower that, once properly tuned, will blow wind out of a modified nozzle at over 500 miles an hour – that thing is bad ass!!  The newest addition to the fleet is an Echo string trimmer that I bought about 4 years ago, it is a fine machine and has not given me one problem, yet. 

First and foremost it seems ridiculous that I need (or want) all those gadgets just to maintain my surroundings in an approved (by society) way that will not get me in trouble with the homeowners association.  I have written about that before, here is a link "lawn implements"  I have also written about my lawn mower by itself, here is link to that one "mower with hood scoop"  Ya know, after reading those two again I realized that I laughed all the way through - at the things I will write about, and I do know that something is wrong - I just do not care.  As a kid I occasionally worked on farms and I think I have more implements than some of the farmers I worked for. 

So when one’s stable of equipment is as large as mine it takes quite a bit of maintenance to keep them all running and happy.   Some folks may be able to take their machines to the shop every year to get “tuned up”, me I spent all the money I have buying them so can’t do that.  I have to maintain them myself so every year I spend a few bucks and a few hours and perform preventative and corrective maintenance on all of them.  As if late it seems to be getting ridiculously expensive to purchase the materials, I suppose the shops are charging more as well these days.   I spent, between two different stores, 80 bucks to buy some air and fuel filters, some spark plugs, edger blades and trimmer line and a quart of oil – 80 freakin dollars!!  I am still pissed off about it and that was yesterday I spent that money. 

I am upset at several things, the cost yes but also at the way these big box stores operate.  When I speak of big box stores in this case I am talking about Lowes and Home Depot.   I am also upset with the green revolution and what it has done to the cost of spark plugs and air filters.  Maybe I am just upset that I don’t make enough money to take my equipment someplace or to just have someone else maintain my yard.  Not sure but I think there is something more to that then I might want to admit. 

Anyway, I am not able to get all the pieces parts at one store, each of the BB stores carries certain brands and sometimes they match what I have, sometimes they don’t.  They change the brands they carry so often that it makes it impossible to plan on them having the thing you just bought from them yesterday.  They look for the products they can make the most margin with and that is what they are selling that week.  So I spend about 40 bucks at Lowes and that gets me the air filter for my lawn mower, the edger blades, tow of fuel filters and spark plugs for the 3 of my machines.  Not a normal old ordinary 99 cent spark plug, oh no you can’t buy those anymore as they do not burn 100% of the fuel and when they are used it creates unwanted emissions, more than my old Jalopy I am told but do not believe.  You have to buy the eco-friendly models that cost 6 bucks a pop – yeah for a lawn mower spark plug.  I remember when I was a kid we used to take the ones from a car we just tuned up and used them – for free!        

Next stop the Home Depot where I find no one to assist but do find the rest of the items I need.  The other spark plug, the trimmer line (titanium the box tells me although I doubt there is any titanium in the string) and one more air filter.  I have it all except the filter for the blower, evidently neither place carry that brand anymore so therefore they do not carry the replacement parts, silly bullshit in my opinion.  So on my way home I also stop at the auto parts store for a can of carb cleaner, it is half the price that the BB stores charge for it.  As I am riding along in silence I started to wonder how it can be that the air filter for my lawn mower costs more than the air filter AND oil filter combined that I use for the Jalopy – and those are Fram models not the knock off brands.  Mowers used to have a foam element for the air filter, once a year it would be pulled out, rinsed in leaded gas using our bare hands and then the gas and dirt were wrung out, right there in the grass and then that little wad of foam was reinstalled and voila’ another year of clean air was supplied to the mower.  And the thought of a fuel filter was unheard on a lawn mower or yard implement. 

So this morning I am sitting in the garage, surrounded by my 80 dollars’ worth of goodies getting ready to perform some maintenance.  So all the carburetors come off and get thoroughly cleaned and inspected for loose or broken parts, thank God today none were found.  After a couple of hours all the new parts were installed and all the machinery was looking cleaned up and ready for prime time.  I immediately set about mowing, edging, weed eating and blowing my yard.  Everything came out looking fabulous so I suppose the money was well spent, I am not sure I am 100% over it but I am getting there.  And what choice do I have really, to neglect routine maintenance will only shorten the life of the equipment and since I complaining about the 80 bucks you can guess that I do not have the cash to replace any of those items, so 80 bucks it is.

What do you spend to maintain your lawn equipment, or what do you pay to have it done?       

There is nothing worse than a dead battery - really??

There is nothing worse than a dead battery, that is what a commercial told me.  Nothing worse than a dead battery, I am not sure I agree with that assumption.  The commercial starts out with folks trying to start their car and then realizing that the battery is dead.  The first ones we see is mother with her daughter who says - no, not now.   I am not sure they could make either the mother or the daughter look more pathetic, it was stupid in its imagery.  The next victim of this horrific sequence of events is a middle aged man with a beard, he has no talking lines but he just looks dumbfounded, as if someone told him that his toes were going to be cut off one at a time.  From him we run into a woman who is uttering, come on please, it appeared that her world was literally coming to an end and the Reaper was waiting right outside her door.

My favorite one was the man who starts out saying, ohhh and then laughs, almost satanically, and then mutters, great.  I like him the best because I have reacted exactly like that before when my car would not start.  The next targets of the dead battery are a couple who look like they are going to miss dinner with her folks at which they would be told they will be getting the inheritance, which since they won’t be there - they will not receive and they know it.  The next poor bastard is sweating like a politician under oath and looking as if he is getting ready to have a stroke and appearing moments away from crying, my heart goes out to that guy.  Him and the lady who is sitting in her SUV in a work parking lot with a monsoon beating down from the skies, her life is over, it is obvious.
  

We move from there to folks who have purchased the Duralast battery, the one that is engineered to start, day in and day out we are told and this technological marvel operates flawlessly, even under the most extreme conditions.  Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these batteries  from the swift completion of their appointed starting tasks, I am not sure it was worded exactly like that but that is what I heard.  That damn battery has been proven tough, I am not sure exactly how but we are lead to believe that a testing program the likes of which might be used on the international space station is in place to ensure your car batteries operation, every time all the time.  No specific testing methodologies were noted but I am sure there were some scientific and repeatable testing methods are used.

That commercial was just wrong on so many levels that I wonder what dunder-head would buy that battery based on that commercial.  The one fact they neglected to mention was this, that wonder battery they are hocking will one day be dead and leave those smiling idiots in the same position as the folks they showed in the commercial, yeah the ones who did not have the Duralast battery.  The primary killer of batteries is age, although charging causes the sulfate deposited on the plates to return to the acid, the process is not perfect. A small amount of sulfate insulating residue (sulfation) remains on the plates of the battery. With each charge/discharge cycle of the battery this residue accumulates. This process eventually results in diminished electrical conductivity of the plates as well as permanently diluted sulfuric acid and eventually the battery will no longer maintain a charge.  That happens slowly until you are that person muttering aloud or under your breath - oh, great!

So I got to wondering about the comment of “nothing worse” than having a dead battery.  How ridiculous is that statement?  Bride and I drive old cars and there are times that they won’t start.  Is it an inconvenience, sure.  Is there nothing worse – of course there are worse things.  My old Jalopy is a three speed so I never worry about a dead battery.  I have, on more than one occasion, just pushed it a little bit and dumped the clutch and voila, she be started right up.  In Brides car we keep some jumper cables for such inevitabilities.

When I think about all the craziness in the world I am not sure how having a dead battery on our car can be called “nothing worse”.  I would think that our Military dying in far-away lands is far worse than a bit of inconvenience in our ability to get from point a to point b.  I would think the murder rate in your home town being ridiculously high is much worse than being able to run down to the corner store for your damn Twinkies.  I would think that children being abused does not even fall on the same scale of “nothing worse”.  I could go on and on but my point is the stupidity of the advertising we are bombarded with.  Nothing worse, maybe there could be nothing worse than never seeing that foolish damn commercial.  I am making a pledge right now, it will be cold day in hell before I ever buy a Duralast battery – just because your commercials are idiotic.

Nothing worse my ass, what idiots!!

What has techology done for us lately (or done to use lately)

I really should not have one bad word to utter about technology as fixing the busted electronic gadgetry has been how I have made my livelihood - for over 25 years.   When you sit and wonder though, yes that is something that does not require an “app”, blue tooth or a WIFI enabled hot spot, to do.  To just sit and stare and wonder about inane things is relaxing, to our overworked and over-connected brains.  Computers were to solve the world’s problems, create a paperless world and allow us to do more of nothing.  Well they have morphed over the years but not into any of those things.  They created words like multi-tasking, which is a bullshit word, and others have joined the lexicon as well.  I am not sure I like it because it separates us even more, in my opinion. 

Technology is advancing so rapidly that the curve has left even the remotest correlation to anything linear – it is a curve that is almost an exponential version of an ever increasing exponentially insane curve.  For us in the field of selecting and maintaining technological gadgets, for business or personal, we are increasingly behind the 8 ball to select the correct technological solution to compensate for some issue that was created by nothing more than non-cooperative departments with clueless leadership.  If I was to think about it in an old school sort of way it could be compared to nailing Jell-O to the wall, for those who didn’t get that because there is no “G” number in it or no “app” involved - I am so sorry for you.       

I understand that some technologies are GREAT, better than good and simply stupefying – MRI machines, laser knives for the removal of cancerous cells and the fact that they can replace an entire knee joint in a few short minutes, that is the kind of technology I am all for.  Technology that solves big and real problems in the world, those are good and I am onboard.  The ones that saves lives and prevents accidents, love em!  The ones that make our kids safer in school and at the mall – can’t beat that kind of stuff at all.

Ya know, as I am pecking away on the keyboard I am beginning to realize that maybe my issues have more to do with the application of technology and the fact that we have not spent enough time considering its long term impact.  Not on the problem solving side, those benefits are pretty clear in most cases but on the social side of things.  Sure calculators have made some not as smart in math, I am in that group, but if we forget to learn the theories then when the calculator breaks where are we left?  In the dark I suspect.   Each new advance of technology makes us more susceptible to it, by that I mean we are beholden to it because we forget the theory we needed before the gadget started doing those functions for us.  A perfect example of one that is inane as hell, what is your best friend’s phone number?  Or your parents of coworkers or other family members?  Think about how critical your little hand held electronic gadget has become to you. 

It has become so important that other technologies have sprung up to solve these new problems created by old technology.  We can now back our stuff up, in what they call the cloud.  What the hell is that??  We are all going to working and playing in the cloud soon they say, whoever this nebulous group called “they” is.  Well if I scroll back through the spiral bound ram that is my brain I seem to remember that sometimes clouds will rain down on us a pure hell, water, hurricanes, tornados and hail storms.  That is where we are all putting our stuff, has anyone taken a few minutes to think the ramifications of that all the way through?  The cloud, like all technologies, provides many pluses but we have not determined what the down sides are.  I don’t suppose it matters, whatever they are we will invent some new technology to fix that problem as well.  Technological solutions that were created to solve issues that were created when we solved other technological problems.  Are ya beginning to see what I am trying to say?

Sometimes I like to just sit and stare and wonder and ponder.   Recently Bride and I were rearranging a room, after my Niece moved out, and we hung a big picture frame, with nothing in it.  At first I was not sure about her idea but now I have sat and stared at it, I love it.  It allows me to just stare and I use my imagination to fill that frame with pictures and memories.   It did not happen at a fast pace, there was no app to speed up the process, just sitting and staring at the wall through an empty frame.  It has provided a starting point to some very personal journeys, I have thought of my Dad while staring into that frame, I have also thought of my Mom, all while staring away in silence.  I miss them both but that frame has allowed moments that brought them back to me as if they were sitting beside me.  I have also pondered what my life would have been had I not left small town Ohio, what it would have been with 10 years in the Navy, what it would be like without the 20+ years with Bride.   I love that empty frame.

There is no technology, just a frame on the wall.  I also like to work with wood, recently I spent a few hours on a couple of different afternoons sharpening chisels and hand planes.  Sure they made a technological wonder that plugs into an outlet and will get them razor sharp in no time.  I rather enjoy sharpening them the way my Dad taught me.  Is it slower, yes by several magnitudes of order, but that time of monotonous stroking can be spent wondering about other things, and that is a good thing.  Also when you finally get that 14 inch long smooth bottom Bailey plane sharp enough to shave with (yes that is how sharp mine is) it provides a lot of satisfaction simply because it was not easy to achieve.  When things are easy to accomplish there is rarely ever pride in the work because it only took moments to complete before you were on to something else that is made easy by some other technological gadget. 

I love those old tools and I get even more satisfaction when I stroke that plane across a piece of birds eye maple and it shaves off a sliver of wood that is about a third of the thickness of a sheet of paper and it has not torn up the wood in the process.  For those who have ever planed birds eye maple you know how sharp the tools must be.  So not only do I get the enjoyment of keeping the tools in proper working order and sharp I get the enjoyment of using them to make something.  And that something will have been created with pride in workmanship, something that is lacking in our world, in my opinion.  I suppose that was inevitable when things can be sped up and done at a rate that staggers the imagination because we have applied a technological solution to a problem that did not really exist in the first place. 

I implore you, if you have never spent hours refurbishing a wood plane and even more hours sharpening it to literally razor sharpness, then go to a flea market and by an old rusty one and call me.  I will teach you how to refurb it and how to sharpen it and hopefully it will slow you down long enough to teach you a thing or two about our fast paced world and how to better cope with it.  I might even teach you how to fashion some little wooden trinket using your new block plane.  I ask that you spend some time every day, away from your gadgets, staring a frame, staring at the clouds or just plain staring into space and let your imagination take you on a journey, to where ever it wants to go.