Yes, I just want it to die. My old mower is just like that guy in "Blood Simple" who just keeps moving around in the grave and no amount of mayhem will do it in.
First a little background. My wife and I got married in 1982 and bought our first house at the same time. Well, we needed a mower so we went to Sears to buy one. Not having much money, we settled on the cheapest mower that Sears had at the time. It happened to be the year that they started to put those safety lever on the handles of mowers so that you could not leave the mower without the engine cutting off. Man, I just hated that. Apparently, the premise being that we are just too stupid to step away from the mower to pick up a stick or dog toy without somehow cutting a few toes off. Heck, I have been knows to leave the mower running while I go inside to have lunch. Just ask one of my neighbors about this. So somebody in our government dictated this new safety device to help protect us all from ourselves. However it was just my luck that the cheap mower that we bought was left over from the last year and did not have this annoying safety device. Tea parties hell! Every time I step away from my running mower to go inside to use the bathroom, I feel like I am "sticking it to the Man." That and the fact that it was the only mower there for under $100 made the decision easy for me. The engine was white and the housing blue. Not much else to it.
As mowers go, it was pretty basic for even way back in the 1980s. It was all metal, (see if you can find that now) and had four hard plastic wheels. The engine was your basic stripped down 3.5 HP version with no bells and whistles. And it has always worked just fine. At first, being young and naive, I was pretty diligent about changing the oil once a year and keeping the air filter clean. I also sharpened the blade once in a while. As time went by, the oil changes became less frequent. Now, 28 years later, I have not changed the oil or looked at the air filter in over a decade. The spark plug is the original and I have never removed it for cleaning.
No need to do all this really. The mower was getting old and my wife started making noises about replacing the mower with something more environmentally friendly around 1995. Apparently, a mower built 25 years ago is a bad thing for the environment. Studies show that one old lawnmower puts more toxic waste in the air in one afternoon than than your average rust belt factory will in a year. (Seriously, look it up. It's on the net.) The deal was that I would just run it into the ground and we would then get something with a 200 foot long extension cord or that ran off of clean burning cow pies to satisfy my wife.
The problem is the damn thing won't die. It has been 28 years (about 240 years in lawnmower time) and the thing still works just fine. About five or six years ago a crack appeared on the metal housing and is slowly working its way towards the motor mount. Who knows if this will kill the mower or not. It certainly vibrates a little more these days but still cuts the grass.
This spring after a winter of neglect, (Yes, you are correct, I never drain the gas tank like you are supposed to do over the winter.) I pulled the old girl out to the driveway for a test fire up. Seriously this mower makes more noise rattling and vibrating as you pull it over the ground than when the motor is actually running. Well, the motor fired up on the first pull. No lie! My wife was in the yard with me and without a single glance towards her, I could sense the look of disgust she was making behind me. I could not help just backing away into the cloud of blue smoke and admiring the old thing for it's sheer willpower. Because, any more than a dozen pulls of the cord and it off to the junkyard. There she was, roaring like a young tiger cub and shaking like a threshing machine. Then I cut the grass.
So there you have it. Every once in a while I go to Sears and look over the new mowers. They are all bright and pretty. The seem to have a lot of plastic in them. That really makes me wonder how they work without melting. Supposedly they are more efficient. Some are self propelled and have big wheels on the back. some have grass catchers and bear the promise to not just cut your grass but mulch it as well. There are a lot of weird safety devices on mowers these days. I wonder if I do buy one if I can duct tape that safety lever so that it is always closed and the motor will still run if I step away from the mower. One thing I do know. If I do buy a new mower, it will undeniably just like every other piece of crap that I buy these days beak real soon and have to be tossed out because the cost of fixing it will be more than replacing it. Now I know that I am really sounding like an old man here but it is true. Perhaps my desire to kill my mower stems form the knowledge that I won't ever see the likes of this mower again, and I just can't stand the thought.
I have beat the heck out of this old mower for almost three decades and never had to spend an hour and a half talking to some call service center in India about getting it fixed or replaced or reprogrammed. Never had to box it up to send back for repairs or because it turned out to be incompatible with the type of grass I am cutting. So I guess I am trying to kill it because it reminds me too much of what a product is supposed to be, reliable, simple and long lasting.........and I can't stand the thought that when it is gone I will have lost another grip on the the way consumer products use to be and never will be again.
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