Victoria fixing the Mower

Despite still not being very well, life has to go on and my daughter, Nicola had problems with her mower which has been declared to be beyond repair; I will eventually of course fix it. In the meantime the grass keeps growing and they do need a mower to sort this problem out. In our discussions it became apparent that they had a very good ride-on mower, which had sat outside, unused for three years and which they thought was only fit for scrap. I said I would have a look at it to see if I could get it running as a temporary measure and took a cursory look at it yesterday. It was immediately apparent that apart from neglect and a lot of dirt this mower was still in very good condition, so today was planned to work on it and fix it. Everything always takes longer than anticipated and some parts were absolutely a pig to get at, so in the end I decided to fully dismantle it and rebuilt it.

We made reasonable progress, the carburettor is now re-built, as is the steering, the engine has been checked over and spun up with the starter motor, but not yet fired up and most of the main structure has been cleaned, but that is as far as we got today. Tomorrow Victoria and I (my fourteen-year-old granddaughter in picture) will be removing the cutter deck, the belt drives and the gearbox to overhaul those and then reassembling the mower before she tests it by mowing the lawn. Working with her has been absolutely delightful, I have been kneeing down working on the parts and she has been running around fetching and carrying as well as learning how to do each of the jobs as they came to hand; she can now fix all these parts as well as I can although she would still benefit from a little more practice.