Teamwork

We've been busy around here lately. (Why do I even bother to say that out loud?) This time of year, it's hard to get to all the things on our list with the grass growing like mad. But with teamwork, all things are possible.

Since we are helping take care of part of our neighbor's property, it takes about eight total man-hours to mow everything we want and need to. (The grass on the go-kart track can not be allowed to get high.) Chris usually takes care of our property, while I handle the neighbor's with my riding mower. 

Friday, Chris decided to get a jump on the week's mowing. One half hour into it, he realized the blades has stopped turning (and cutting) the grass. Digging back into the memories of his Belmont Landscape Maintenance days, he remembered a problem they used to have with some of the mowers. The PTO switches would sometimes go bad. He pulled the part off his mower, and looked the part up online. It would cost us $30 and several days to get it fixed. Frustrated with the setback, we took a minute to daydream about selling his walk-behind mower that is too big for me to handle and buying a zero-turn I could use as well.

Wanting to make sure we wouldn't order a part we didn't need, I looked up a video on testing switches. Some shenanigans with the multi-meter revealed that the switch was still good. A few more more YouTube videos later, and we figured out we could test the mower's electric clutch by checking for electrical continuity through the clutch. Poking the probes into the wire harness sticking out of the clutch led us to believe the clutch was bad. I looked the part up online and discovered it would cost us  at least $180 and several days to get it fixed. 

At this point, it was getting late in the day, so we called it quits.

Saturday morning, Chris told me not to order the part yet. He wanted to pull the mower apart first. A few hours later, he had the clutch in hand. He wanted to test it again, just to make sure it was bad. This time, to my surprise, it looked good. We fiddled a bit with the section of wire harness that attaches the wires above the mowing deck to the clutch below and discovered a break in one of the wires. I went inside and looked the part up online. It would cost $15 and several days to get it fixed.

Instead, Chris decided we should try to fix it. He managed pulled the wire harness apart without breaking anything, reset the wire, and together we soldered it back into place, and it didn't cost us but a few hours of time. 

By the end of Saturday, the mowing was done.

And, now, because Chris doesn't want me to post a picture of him working on the mower, here is a picture of a lovely, little salamander I came across today.