When our weeds/grass started to grow again after the winter, I dragged our lawn mower –– inert since October –– from the shed, shot some “starter fluid” on the filter, pulled the starter cord, and fired it up: first pull.
I was chuffed, especially when it kept going; when I put it away last year, it had started to become recalcitrant: sometimes difficult to start, sometimes running, but poorly.
So I wasn’t astonished when, after about 15 minutes, it just quit.
I filtered and replaced the fuel, replaced the oil, and restarted it. This time it ran again, but raggedly. I didn’t run it long enough to discover if it would refuse again.
Already last summer I’d begun to think about replacing it, or at least adding another to our stable. We’re generally edging into all-electric, so off to C&L, where they sold me a very nice battery-operated mower for about three times what I had paid for the gas mower about ten years ago.
As expected, it works a treat, and although our yard has enough “mow-able” area that two batteries don’t quite do the trick, I’m old and retired, so I can wait for the recharge.
Anyway, yesterday I took the old mower into a repair shop for them to tell me whether it was fixable.
The mechanic assured me it wasn’t, not for an acceptable price. So there’s that.
Good thing we have a gas-powered van which can use the 10 litres of fresh gas!
Then there’s the chain saw.
I bought it years ago when I was still allowed to climb to the top of our hedge. At the time I needed to take the top two feet off. It’s a long hedge, and there are a lot of cedars that needed their heads lopped.
So the saw is small, and light, and altogether delightful. An Echo. I’ve used it a lot, considering most of our “forest” consists of rhododendrons, and most of them have turned into trees which need regular trimming. And we have a number of fruit trees which also need regular trimming.
(And haven’t the rhodos been absolutely gorgeous this year? The best ever!)
Last fall we had three apple trees and two pear trees. Two of the apples and one of the pears developed so many worms that the fruit was pretty-much unusable.
I’m not really into spraying any longer, not even with lime sulphur, which rhodos don't like.
Also, they were starting to interfere with the rhodos.
In short, my saw got to talk to those trees this spring.
I was well into the largest of the apples, a full-sized golden reinett, when the saw quit. I started it, and it quit again. And then I couldn’t turn the engine over any longer.
So off to the shop where I’d originally bought the saw and where they couldn’t turn it over either. They took the plug out to have a look: “But it’s dry! You’ve been using the wrong gas!”
That initially seemed really unlikely, as I have a dedicated fuel tank for my saw and hedge trimmer, and I was entirely confident that was the fuel I’d used.
But then I realized: Oh no! serious seniors’ moment! When I’d filled up that gas tank in the fall I’d put in the fuel stabilizer to get the fuel through the winter, but had almost certainly forgotten to also add the oil.
Result one dead saw.
They were most sympathetic; told me they see this all the time...
Somehow that just didn’t take the sting out.
What did, finally, was when one of the service guys remembered that, although they no longer handle Echo saws, they still had some old inventory filed away. And one of the boxes contained a dead ringer for my saw.
I bought it for considerably less than a contemporary saw would have cost, went home, put oil in the gas tank, and finished the job.
The tree never knew the difference.
