I had a ton of shit to do this weekend (spoiler alert, none of it got done).
I was (as usual) behind the eight ball. Winter held on, clinging to the bitter end. It deviously gave up the exact millisecond my lawn was primed to go nuclear. This is normal; every spring my lawn goes from frozen tundra to wet burgeoning jungle in a flash.
I made a special trip to town to get fresh gas because I just knew the EPA mandated soup in my lawnmower’s tank would be crap. Then I maneuvered my truck close to the shed where the lawnmower lives because I’d need a jumpstart. Sometimes I pull the battery and keep it on a maintainer in the garage (with mixed success). This winter I left it in situ. It would certainly be dead.
Shockingly, it fired right up! No need for new gas or jumper cables? I practically fell off the seat.
The gas seemed OK too! Apparently, I had used Sta-Bil last fall? Also, the battery is made of magic?
More miracles followed! I checked under the hood and found a piece of tape stuck to it the engine with my very own writing. I’d changed the oil in September. No shit!
My only explanation is that some doppelgänger slipped onto my property last fall, properly “put to bed” my lawnmower, and then vanished. I ought to buy that guy a beer.
The only issue was a flat tire. Pretty good news! I limped it to the air compressor, filled it, and it held air. Could it be I would actually get to mow lawn? Usually I have to move heaven and earth every spring to resurrect various frozen equipment. I was delighted with my good fortune.
I lined up on the first strip of scraggly lawn and hit the PTO switch… nothing. I looked at the mower deck. There was no belt at all. Da fuck?!?!
I racked my brains and gradually remembered what happened. The belt broke in autumn. Being the kind of guy who’d rather build a boat than fret about landscaping, I just said “fuck it” and ended the lawnmowing season. How that led to good gas, clean oil, and a non-dead battery is a mystery.
I dimly remembered buying a belt and… holy shit… there it was! Hanging on a hook, in my shop, totally pristine and waiting… a new mower belt. Did I do that?
OK folks, you gotta’ tell me the truth here. Am I the only one who has so many irons in the fire he can’t even remember the tasks he’s accomplished? How does this work for other people?
Also, how come everyone has time to watch a gazillion hours of Game of Thrones? (On reflection I’ve never watched Game of Thrones but I did spend a few hours reading the first few books. They were OK at the start. Then it dawned on me it wasn’t going to get better. “Wait a minute, these dumbasses are never going to prepare for winter! They’re starting wars when they need to be harvesting crops. Fuck them! I have no sympathy for a single one of these nitwits. Ant and grasshopper dammit!” That’s when I stopped reading. Anyone who starts a war on the cusp of winter deserves to get Napoleoned.)
But I digress.
Back in the shop I manfully attacked the mower deck. Changing a belt should be no big deal. Emphasis on “should”.
Unfortunately, my deck was engineered by brain damaged howler monkeys; cretinous dipshits who shouldn’t have been let out of engineering class. We ought to keep overeducated wretches away from the machinery I use in real life. (Possibly, lock them in endless calculus classes until the student loans kill ‘em?) I live in a world engineered to be built in China and thrown away in America; getting shit done seems irrelevant to all parts of the flow chart!
God forbid the deck have more that one belt. That might increase friction by 0.001% and require 1/32” more metal in a few strategic places on a deck that’s carefully designed to be as flimsy as cardboard. Instead, some brass plated egghead thought it grand to wind 6’ of v-belt through 3 blade pullies, 2 idler pullies (one with a tension spring), and the engine’s PTO pulley. Six points of inflection asymmetrically scattered around a continuous loop. It’s a fuckin’ M.C Escher illustration down there!
I tried to slip the belt around various pullies while the deck was still installed… as should be possible in any sane world. When that didn’t work, I yanked the deck. In theory this is a matter of pulling a few pins but in reality it’s a PITA. I twisted my back in ways only appropriate for some MILFy yoga instructor and not a chunky bearded dude laying on cement. (I hear the song of ibuprofen singing in my ears.)
It’s a good thing I pulled the deck though. The idler pullies had “belt guides” so close to the pullies that there was no way a belt would ever “slip over” merely by releasing the tensioning spring. I don’t know if this is the OEM design or due to one of the (professionally installed) deck repairs. (I had the deck repaired at a dealer last spring.)
A note about lawn tractors. They’re all shit. Every fucking one of them. Even if your lawn tractor is a Name Brand XXX with turbo mow-amatic features… it’s either five grand or shit. If you do anything more than gingerly mowing a quarter acre of tabletop flat manicured greenery it’s going to implode like a child actor discovering cocaine. Virtually every riding lawnmower brand is excreted into shipping containers from nearly identical factories staffed by the same tragically underpaid peasants working with the same shitty plastics and pot metal. They’re engineered to whatever minimal price point some marketing jackwipe with a spreadsheet deemed necessary. I have a Cub Cadet with a Kawasaki engine. Hardly a bargain basement brand… and it’s shit. The deck rusted faster than I though possible (and a replacement deck is big bucks), the hydrostatic transmission loses traction at precisely the angle required to suit the most cringing, limp dicked, liability lawyer in creation, and the whole thing has the fit and finish appropriate for stoners making macaroni sculptures with hot glue. It was shit when it was made, it was shit when I bought it, and it’s double extra super shit when I’m contorted on a cement floor routing a belt through an infinite loop of suck.
Ugh! I hate shitty equipment and all of my equipment is shitty!
Eventually, because I could see no other solution, I removed both idler pullies, slipped on the belt, and reinstalled. That can’t be the right way. It’s gotta’ be modified from OEM right?
Also, I did read the manual! What makes you think that would help? The bulk of it was bitching that you shouldn’t do stupid things like use it to mix margaritas or hurl children at the rotating blades. Then there’s a section about how you should be wearing a safety vest, helmet, and titanium cup before you go anywhere near it. After that it spent more pages explaining it was made of materials known to the State of California to give ass cancer to puppies. Way in the back it briefly mentioned that it has a belt and only people with a PhD from Cub Cadet university should have access to this esoteric dark knowledge. However, it did spend three paragraphs saying that only a Cub Cadet belt will suffice and all those other brands should be banned by Federal law.
Finally, after a lot of swearing, I had it reinstalled. I lined up on the grass and hit the PTO. The blades were spinning, grass was getting cut, all was well. I drove three feet and the belt popped off a pulley somewhere. Dead in the water again.
I sat there on my tractor pondering my fate. “Well it could be worse” I though.
Then it started raining.
I can take a hint. I drove it back into it’s shed, shut it down, ran through the rain to the house, and poured a nip of bourbon. I’ll try again later.