UP UP UP can only go up from here......yeah...yeah...yeah....

sung succinctly by Shania Twain.....its about as bad as it could be........



I blogged recently about Tecumseh parts that are now made overseas. We are working late on a Saturday night to get a snowblower done for a storm that is coming up the Atlantic coastline this coming Wednesday....we had a very close brush today but the blockbuster that hit Washington D.C. with feet of snow missing us..... take the entire flywheel off and again change points and condenser put all back together except the starter cover.

 Mr. Fix-it asked me if I wanted a picture of the ignition spark to put in this post, and we plug in and press electric starter button and VOILA! NO SPARK!  go figure........had to take apart and straighten contact area, it is bad from factory,( probably a  factory overseas employing children)
We spoke to supplier several weeks ago about these sub-par parts, looks they are still sending them out.....you can't beat big business.....one day they will all come toppling down......a shot will be heard across the country on quality soon enough just like the recent upheaval in the U.S. Senate.

customer integrity or lack thereof...

Mr. Fix-it recently repaired an old Ariens snowblower for a customer that almost isn't a customer. What I mean by that is he is not a regular customer and we have only repaired this machine for him once,and it was more than 10 years ago.
We took the 1968 Ariens snowblower in about two months ago...over time Mr. Fix-it went through it. He repaired bushings in the axle, the second stage fan bearing, the idler pulleys, the carburetor, belts, I i could go on and on...but you get my point, it was a lot of work.
About a week after the delivery, and still having not been paid for the repair because the customer did not have any money, we received a cryptic telephone message from customer saying that he thinks he has  a pair of our pliers at his house.????? Mr. Fix-It calls him when he receives the message and talks to the customer who states we must have dropped them in his driveway and that they are now thoroughly jammed between the auger and housing.
We pack a bucket of tools,Mr. Fix-it and I are going to check this out right away....we take a hammer, some drifts and some shear pins , just in case.
We get there, I ring the doorbell, the customer comes to the door, I ask him to open the garage, he is semi-handicapped (due to his habit of eating too much food) so it takes him a while to get to the door opener. The door opens and we go in to check it out. There is a pair of 8 inch pliers jammed in there pretty good, and one of the shear pins has been snapped ( thus doing the job it has been designed to do). Mr. fix- It gets the hammer and drift and gives it a few good raps.....the pliers come loose. He changes the sheared pin....the whole time this is happening, maybe a minute or two, the customer keeps stating the pliers must be ours. I know all our tools,and they clearly aren't ours.
The customer lived on a dead end road, with a pond right there,.The  ice fisherman regularly park there and I walked over there and there is always an array of miscellaneous items in the road, just like there was that day. I suggested this might be the case to the customer. He wasn't buying that....the customer actually doesn't even use the snowblower, his neighbor walks down and in exchange for blowing his own driveway does our customers  along with another neighbors. (Its also possible he picked up the pliers running it up and down the street doing those other driveways?)

this is my thought on the matter...

the customers goal was to get this fixed, and not take any money out of his pocket no matter what. for a service call. It's too bad his lack of integrity has lost him the services of Mr. Fix-It...I hope that juicy steak he was putting on the grill that night was worth it.

 integrity:  mean uprightness of character or action. honesty implies a refusal to lie, steal, or deceive in any way. honor suggests an active or anxious regard for the standards of one's profession, calling, or position. integrity implies trustworthiness and incorruptibility to a degree that one is incapable of being false to a trust, responsibility, or pledge

Gasoline Scooter fuel filter failure

Last week we went in to the shop to the smell of gasoline, we found that a scooter that was in for service was leaking gasoline. We did not have the time that day to investigate further so Mr. Fix-It used some surgical clamps on the fuel line and clamped it off.
We were able to throw a little time at it late last night because Mr. Fix-it  was dirty and as gas was going to be running down his arm into his shirt from removing the fuel filter he wanted to have it as the last thing of his day.
He contorted himself into a pretzel-like shape and attempted to remove the fuel filter. The line was gummy and mushy, fuel was dripping... he finally worked it off. He positioned a new one and forced it on for now. When we work on the scooter in the next several weeks we will have more to do on the lines and fuel system. I will keep you posted.
Here is what happened to the fuel filter, the plastic melted because it was not ethanol resistant. Below is a picture.

Groundhog Day Celebration or Bust?

Groundhog Day comes with great anticipation in our shop, we are optimistic that every year we are going to have an early spring ...Mr. Fix-it and I wait for Punxatony Phil to come out of his hole to see if he will see his shadow or not.
As we get older we realize that the winter seems to get longer and longer here in the Northeast.....so the hour came and Phil came out and he saw his shadow...........6 MORE WEEKS OF WINTER!...Bust.

Mantra....

in our family and with our friends their mantra is...."if it ain't broke don't fix it", and "even if it is broke, don't fix it right away or better yet, don't fix it at all".....you can see where all this could lead.......

Toro snowblower ignition module replacement

Mr. Fix-it recently fixed up a very old and rusty used toro snowblower for my sister and brother-in law. My brother -in-law has had a plow on his last two trucks and has always helped everyone in the family out in their time of need, and when we were too lazy to do it ourselves. He  sold his truck this past fall so he did not have a way of moving snow for himself except a waxed-up shovel!( if you have been following my recent posts you have heard me refer this part of the country we live in the frozen tundra).

The last part we were waiting for was an ignition module. The last couple of times he has used it he has had to shut the snowblower off by choking it out because the module wasn't working. We went to their house with a handful of tools and changed it out.

While we were at my sisters house  Mr. Fix-It wanted to check out the boiler we cleaned several weeks ago...the water pressure seemed a bit low, Mr. Fix-It decided to dump the valves to see if there was any air in the system, all seemed okay, but the pressure valve reading was still a bit low....we are going to keep our eyes on it.

ROBOT VACUUM

My grandmother has been looking at a robot vacuum for more than a year, she has finally "jumped in" taking advantage of a recent inheritance and plopped down $59.99 plus shipping and handling. How can she go wrong, it even comes with a FREE wallet?

She was so excited to get it in the mail, take it out of the package, ignore reading the pamphlet on how to set up and run, and immediately plugged the battery pack into the wall for the endless 12 hour first charge.........

Thursday passes with the  no-charge indicator light still on....then Friday, still the indicator light is still flashing not charged yet......Saturday rolls around and same thing still indicator light flashing and no "robo-vac" running around the house vacuuming my 92 year old grandmothers very messy house.

Usually she is very strong-willed and will take suggestions from noone. I said to her as gently as possible....."how about I have Mr. Fix-It take a quick look at it?"....she almost immediately agrees with  my suggestion#$%^&*(!.

Mr. Fix-It is in the woodshed filling the stove because we have had single digit temperatures here in the frozen tundra of the Northeast. I bring him the robot vacuum.....he looks at me as if to say " you don't want me to look at that do you?"  Of course he digs in immediately and decides to first test the AC/DC adaptor and it is fine, he then takes off the battery cover and hooks a meter to it and finds it is charged fully.....so why wont this little plastic, made in china, piece of junk work?  After removing countless screws from the housing we seperate it. It takes just a minute or two for Mr. Fix-it to

see that the very small computer board that the battery pack plugs into is cracked.  We can either resolder a wire in there or send it back to the manufacturer, gramma decides to send it back.....at a cost to send it back of $8.95, can you believe they are charging her to send a defective item back to them? Another sub- quality made in a country overseas. Beware, this is just another reason to buy products made in the USA. And remember nothing is ever FREE.