Hey, Lawnmower Repair People

Have I got a job for you!

After getting about 1/5 of the way through my jungle of a backyard last week, my $75-used-via-Kijiji lawnmower up and stalled on me. Being a mechanical engineer, you might think that small engine repair would come rather naturally for me, but boy would you be wrong; I'm more of a math and numbers guy, really. Anyway - my initial stab at troubleshooting involved topping the machine up with fuel and then needlessly-in-retrospect giving the primer pump a few squeezes. Lo and behold, it wouldn't start, due to operator induced flooding I suspect. And so I waited a good 20-30 seconds before recommencing my assault on the pull cord, which escalated with each failed start over the course of five minutes or so, until said pull cord predictably snapped.

This weekend, I tried to install a new pull cord. Oh. Man. This was an exercise in futility on par with reinstalling leaky 30-year old rusted-out toilets back into the cramped crawlspaces from whence they came (see blog). Once I had disassembled the mower to the point where I could access the remaining pull cord - which took an embarrassingly long time in and of itself, and actually broke a screwdriver - I was faced with the near-impossible task of recoiling an uncoiled starter spring, while keeping the new pull cord threaded on the flywheel, and squeezing the whole assembly back into a space with little or no tolerance. And everything was covered in sludgy black grease. Really, I have no idea how this can be accomplished without at least 5 hands. I tried many, many, many times. I swore many, many, many times. I think I was even crying at one point.

Once I thought I had it all together, I rolled the mower back out into the yard, into the oppressive heat of the outside. In my mind, this all happened in slow motion. The gardening and loitering neighbours all turned to watch in a hushed awe. Silence. What they saw was a sweaty angry man, with black grease up to his elbows and smudged all over his clothes, give one heave on a recently-pristine white pull cord - only to have it fall limp to the ground, uncoiled and un-re-coiling, next to the corpse of a once-majestic lawnmower. Cue shameless weeping.

So that's what your faced with: the rebuilding of my pull cord-less, potentially starter spring-less, half-assembled mower/object of my hatred. Er, how much?