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Where is the Random Thread of Randomness stuff that doesn't belong in other threads thread?

 
I love when you've been overdoing it and you decide "OK. Time to put away laundry, take out trash, do dishes, and then go get groceries," and your body goes "OR! You can take a nap. I think you are going to take a nap." Fuck you, body, I've got stuff that needs doing.
 
There's a sketchy dude whose thing, apparently, is to troll around the Home Depot parking lot in a silver minivan, asking people if they're interested in a home theater system.
 
 
I should've made my lawnmower posts in my thread. Since the others are here, I'll add this: Had to mow lawn this weekend. HAD to. Of course it was too wet Saturday so I got to it this afternoon. Got an OK start but killed it on tall grass once and fought with the quirky idle for the rest of the attempt. When things are going well I can get the yard banged out in a little over 4 hours. Today I managed to get about 4% of it cut in 2 hours. At one point I gave up and did something else, hoping the engine would cool off or something. At first that seemed to help but then it wouldn't stay running again. Since I had a little light before bedtime I decided to take one last try and couldn't even get it to start anymore. By this point I'd done everything I could think of with the carb with no luck, so I was resigned to taking it to the repair guys Monday (along with everything else I need to do Monday) but before I did it occurred to me to check the sparkplug. I just put a new one in a few months ago so it should've been fine. Wrong. Heavy with black soot. Of course most of my cleaning stuff is over at the other place so I cleaned it as best I could and this seemed to fix it...for about 15 seconds. Then it died again and wouldn't restart. So I pulled the plug again and tried to get more crud off it. Got the mower to start and stay running but not running well and by this point it was dark out so here I sit.
 
Got everything that HAD to be mowed mowed. Grabbed the old sparkplug and soaked it in mineral spirits and sprayed it with some Super-WD40 stuff while working on it with a toothbrush I remembered I had laying around. Scraped off some carbon with my knife, and washed the air filter with Dawn dish soap and water (it's a foam pad and it's old enough that Lowe's didn't have any replacement filters in stock). I still don't understand how the carb adjusts. There's a little spring that attaches to a cam on the throttle linkage. The other end is hooked to a "T" bracket on the engine cover. The top of the "T" has 3 holes so maybe you adjust the throttle by which hole you hook the spring to? Other thing I've decided is I get the gas-rich idle when I hit something like a root or a rock. I figure it must slow/stop the blade long enough to... get the spark and the fuel out of sync? That's as far as I get. I've got a couple tricks I do to try to get the idle to reset but none of them is guaranteed. I think when I tilt the mower up into a "wheelie" position while the tank isn't full it prevents gas from getting into the carb and...gives a chance to burn up the excess gas? I dunno. Because it's still not a sure thing. Lately I'll get the RPMs up where they should be and then when I lower the front wheels back down and mow a few feet it goes back to the slow idle.
 
Is it the heat? Is it how long the engine's been running? Is it cumulative effects? Is it the slope of the ground? No idea. It's probably the slope of the ground, but I'll get to that. Per my last post, a cleaned up plug got everything essential cut before lunch. After lunch the mower wasn't running as well and I couldn't get it to run well. Eventually I tried cutting the last of the ditch in front of the house. Actually I refer to it as the moat and the compound but I digress. Could not keep it running. Just like Sunday night. Pulled the plug. It was filthy. This was the plug I cleaned and put in this morning. Black and sooty. Luckily I have a second plug that I also cleaned. That got me about 90 seconds of mowing before it was fouled. Tried cleaning them both again but no joy. Eventually I threw in the towel. Cleaned both plugs and the air filter. Cleaned out as much of the engine as I could and called it a night. As much as I'd like to finish off the moat, tomorrow morning I shall stick to level ground and try to finish up the back pasture. If it's running well, I may bump up and try to tackle the moat, but for now the goal is to get as much grass cut as possible before sending the mower off to be serviced.
 
Fuel or fire, one of the two. I discovered my issue was a slight tear in the spark plug boot, causing it to arc off onto the cylinder head causing a misfire so you might want to look for that. Same issues it sounds like. I dunno how I missed that before, but it's not generally something that happens either.

They don't make 'em like they used to.
 
Leviathan Awakes.

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I'm sure it needs a thorough overhaul. It's 15 years old or so--and has been used hard. I'd just buy a new mower but the new ones are junk so I'm going to try to get this one repaired. But I want to take one more shot at getting the rest of the yard cut before I do.
 
Volpone said:
I'm sure it needs a thorough overhaul. It's 15 years old or so--and has been used hard. I'd just buy a new mower but the new ones are junk so I'm going to try to get this one repaired. But I want to take one more shot at getting the rest of the yard cut before I do.
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I got a new coil delivered the other day, but it's been too goddamned hot out there to deal with it. I think that'll solve the problem though. We shall see. I need to pop the flywheel off and clean that up, too.
 
  1. Long story short, I'm pretty sure I saw a concrete pink elephant sitting on the front porch of a house a handful of blocks away, and I'm pretty sure it might be the same one my friends and I stole back when we were 20 and stupid, because there can only be so many of those floating around. And I'm thinking I might go steal it again, but in this era of ring doorbell cams it might not be the best idea in the world.

  2. Maybe I could just offer to buy it.

  3. Tack a note on their door. "Excuse me dear sir/madam, but do you have any great attachment to your pink elephant? Because I'll give you 50 bucks for it."
 
 
Today I realized our society is at a "Star Wars" level. The odd thing about Star Wars, if you were living between about 1984 and 2008, is that they had these old ass 'droids. Even before the horrible prequels, you knew R2 & 3PO had been kicking around for awhile. That seemed odd in an era when tech gizmos were hopelessly obsolete if they were more than 2 years old. Flash forward to today. I will go to great lengths to keep my '09 Mustang running because I think modern cars are garbage. If they made a browser that supported Windows 2000 I'd take my old desktop in a heartbeat over the W11 laptop I'm typing on. I'm trying to find someone to do maintenance on my c 2011 Briggs & Stratton lawnmower engine because the c 2022 one I bought to replace it barely lasted 4 years so I got the old one out of the shed and bolted it to the new body and it was fine for several months. Now it's starting to have some of the problems again that led to its retirement. But since the new motors are junk I guess I have to keep this one running.
 
I had a productive morning. When I'm doing things myself and don't need to rely on anyone, shit gets done. Then I needed other people and progress ground to a stop. My car is due for some deferred maintenance, so I called the shop. Got a machine. My lawnmower is idling funny so once I limped through mowing the lawn I called the hardware store that has a big "WE REPAIR LAWNMOWERS" sign out front. I had a hunch that I should call before loading it in the van and driving it there. Sure enough: "We don't repair lawnmowers. We've got a guy we send them to." Google found me, like, "Dirty Fred's Small Engine & Pornography Shop" that was apparently run out of Dirty Fred's house so I decided to call the big lawn & garden equipment place to see if they had any interest in this. No answer. So I guess I'll have lunch and see if I can get anyone this afternoon. Barring that, I guess I get to watch a shit-ton of YouTube videos and make a run to Harbor Freight. :cautious:
 
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