TORO PERSONAL PACE is in the shop for a look at .....

This TORO walk behind is in the shop for possible repair. A customer and friend of Mr. Fix-its who lives on Marthas Vineyard asked him to look at it. 

The history of this story is interesting....last summer our friend, Anna, called Mr. Fix-it, the small engine shops on Marthas Vineyard would not fix this machine.There happen to be power equipment repair shops on Marthas Vineyard Island. I know this because several years ago  Mr. Fix-it and I were trying to decide if we wanted to move there and hang a shingle. We are still thinking of it, but it hasn't come to fruition yet.... They claim that because they were not a TORO dealer they could not fix it.....never heard that one before, if they are power equipment repair shops not signed by a contract to do work only for a certain manufacturer, I would think that they could repair anything should they choose to repair it.

The same shop could, though, sell Anna a new Husqvarna walk behind for approximately $400.00, and after she bought it, they might consider repairing her TORO. They must have seen her coming a mile away.....

So , Anna, kept this TORO in her garage, or out of it if you have seen her garage, I am not sure you could step foot in it, never mind push a lawnmower in there. Until my sister recently visited them with her Quigley 4 x 4 van with enough room to haul it off the island on a ferry......

So, long story short, it is now in the Fix-It Shop! The machine brand new was around $299.00. When the lawnmower engine was assembled in BRAZIL They pushed the oil seal gasket in crooked. What that caused was a myriad of problems. 

First, the seal was damaged, Mr. Fix-it found this by completely removing the engine from the deck, on the underside. We could not figure out why there was so much apparent blow-by all over the machine. The oil was seeping out of the seal, and when the machine was running, the spinning blade would fling the oil, causing the air-borne oil to coat the entire engine and deck. The over load of oil on all the parts caused some of the rubber parts to break down , causing the breather assembly under the flywheel deteriorate and crack, which can only be accessed by taking the entire starter housing off. . The air cleaner was also in need of replacement, and finally the blade holder was cremated because Anna's husband , John, is the one and only cemetary maintanance guy and he uses his personal lawnmower for cutting at the cemetary, and he must have struck a grave marker or two causing the damage.....   

So, the question would now normally be to repair or to replace.....well, they have already replaced the mower with the Husky, so should they repair this one as a backup? 

The parts for the machine are almost  $100. with shipping and handling. And if Mr. Fix-it throws an hour or two at it for $100 or $150 we are up around the cost of a new machine.....

What would you do?.................. 

LINCOLN suction gun

We have had a Lincold suction gun in the shop for more than 20 years. Our original one recently was replaced with a "new" Lincoln.
The old one could have been rebuilt, but we assumed with buying another by the same manufacturer we'd have no problem with its functioning.
Almost immediately the gun was malfunctioning.... seems liquid inside would slip past gaskets inside, or the arm would not move at all.
Mr. Fix-it assumed it was because we were now suctioning ethanol-laced fuel. Which seems to wreak havoc on any rubber parts it touches. So we decided after having this gun only a few months we were going to have to rebuild the seals inside already.  What did we find? On the old Lincoln each end was threaded in case you needed to take it apart for any reason. Well, unbeknown to us upon purchase  the new gun's ends are crunched on, and cannot be removed for any reason unless you get a cutting torch you cannot get them off.
Thoughts:

1.) Our old LINCOLN was threaded on the ends for easy access.
2.) Our new LINCOLN was not threaded on the ends for "no access"
3.) Neither rubber seal on the suction guns was ethanol- resistant.
4.) there is ethanol in all the fuel we purchase in the Northeast except for Sunoco Racing Fuel (which we can only get by traveling about 20 miles in each direction at at a cost last I checked of $8.25 per gallon)

What can we do?

1.) We can ask LINCOLN to go back to their old design with the threaded ends so we can take apart the gun to rebuild everytime the ethanol damages the seals.

2.) We can ask Washington D.C. to stop allowing the ethanol to be added to fuel and let the corn go back to being treated as food (so maybe we could afford to buy food that had corn as an ingredient)  because all the petroleum companies would no longer be vying for it.
3.) We can purchase racing only fuel to put into all the equipment we run, therefore when it needs to be sucked out from the tank for any reason we wont damage the innards of the suction gun, well if we won Megabucks we could afford that!.



What do you think the chances of any of these 3 things happening? .......Yeah, I agree.

Whopping snowstorm to whallop the Northeast.....

A whopping snowstorm was predicted for the Northeast yesterday 10-15", so we trained New Englanders hunkered down. We went to the store got our bread and milk and waxed up our shovels and made sure we had spare shear pins for the snowblowers...

We planned  several small projects in the shop waiting for the snow to accumulate... our first project was to change the battery terminal on my grandmothers car as it was rusted and eaten by an outgassing battery.


We finish that project and then move on to her oxygen sensor... on December 18, 2009 Mr. Fix-it replaced a piece of her exhaust system , the flex pipe, in that particular piece of the exhaust there exists an oxygen sensor, a part that tells the engine how much gasoline to spray through the computer. The job went well back in December, or so we thought. About a week after replacement the ominous check engine light comes on .....we hook it to the tester and the code read either full rich or shorted, i cant remember exactly.

I dig through all receipts and find that one, luckily it has a year warranty. I call parts store and they ordered me another one. Of course I had to pay for the second one until I returned the defective one, another $100 out of my pocket right now!

Check out the pictures,it is kind of blurry, but it reads...ASSEMBLED IN U.S.A with foreign components....unbelievable.....maybe that is why it lasted a week and then failed?#$%$##@$%^^&&**(




See below pictures of oxygen sensor ......

seems like we are always doing re-do's with parts made overseas....do I sound like a broken record?

by the way, we missed the whopping storm, we got maybe an inch or two of total accumulation.               Life is good.....

ethanol and carburetors

these are several carburetors on the rebuild table.....the one to the left here is a rebuild, bit we had to disassemble it in its entirety, removing all gaskets and rubber parts then soak it in small parts/ carburetor cleaner for 24+ hours, making sure all the jets and the vent hole were clear of the shiny varnish-like coating that clogs all up. The idler shaft on this particular carburetor was also worn out and in need of replacement. Believe it or not it is an original 78 off an Ariens snowblower.

This particular carburetor is off of a Murray snowblower and could not be saved due to the fact that the fuel infused with ethan was left in it so long that it actually corroded the aluminum of the carburetor so badly that the carburetor bowl and carburetor bowl gasket would not seal on the lip on the carb that receives it, and Mr. Fix-it could not clean out the vent hole to allow air exchange. This carburetor replacement was over $100.00. Good idea to drain gas or run it out of carburetor with a fuel shutoff under the tank everytime, it will same you alot of parts and labor money.

Last we have a Zama carburetor , mostly plastic. Cannot be rebuild once damaged by leaving fuel in it. There are no internal parts available. The cost to replace this baby is approximatelt $35.00 plus minimum of an hour labor averaging $65.00 here in the Northeast. So to fix a 5+ year old craftsman blower is at least $100.00. A new one at Sears and Roebuck right now is around $89.00.  We are part of a" throw-away society."


So the question is to rebuild or not to rebuild? That is what i ask thee? Remember ethanol infused gasoline has a shelf life according to small engine manufacturers of 14-21 days right now. If you dont plan on using the piece of equipment in that amount of time either drain the tank or run it out of fuel. It will save you alot of MOOLA!

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snowblower auger grease fittings.....

We are working on another snowblower. The auger has only one grease fitting on each side, when you grease the auger with a grease gun the grease only exits near the auger housing but grease never makes it to the inside of the auger where the gearbox is.

There are two shear pins on each side. How come there aren't two grease fittings? Is this a cost saving measure? Does the manufacturer realize that even though grease gets through one side it is not going into the other end? Then when a chunk of ice is hit or a drain cover heaved on the sidewalk from frost heaves, the shear pin is not going to break, what is going to break is the gearbox because the auger will be rusted to the auger shaft!!

See pictures of Mr. Fix-it drilling and tapping out an additional grease fitting hole in order to get grease to the entire shaft.....Mr. Fix-it was lucky enough to get the augers off of the shaft. Once they were removed he had to grind and sand all the rust from both parts, in order for them to spin freely.

That is an awful lot of work , when another grease fitting from the factory that probably would cost pennies for the part and tool setup to drill one additional hole about 6" away from the other one they put in.....what were they thinking?

Do the engineers wake up every morning and say " How can we make the mechanics lives harder today?"

Where was the cost savings here?

working in the shop on sunday again.....

Ronnie Milsap has a song that just came on and the words ring very true, I am going to try and insert a youtube video of it  here.......it is called TIME , LOVE & MONEY...........

did we miss the superbowl?.....

LIVE GOOD,

deb

What could they have been thinking?

Who in their right mind would fill the gearbox on a snowblower with white lithium grease in the Frozen tundra we call the Northeast.???
  

We are working on a current repair in the shop. It is a Noma/Murray snowblower....look at the picture at the right and tell me what you see......

Simple, first of all......not enough grease, and it is a sealed box so it would never have leaked out.Second, the grease gets pushed almost immediately out to the edges...and what do you think happens? yes,....you are right  the white, cold, grease that has pushed out to the edges doesn't contact that  brass gear you see in the forefront that works in conjunction with the worm gear and all this pretty gold glitter is created and causes the eventual demise of these two gears.



For a few pennies of a bit more grease, or maybe the use of a liquid grease or some sort of gear oil we could have avoided buying these.......

at a cost of about $ 200.00 for the brass and worm gear, plus many hours of labor to rip it apart, clean and preparation and reinstall.....and I know once we install with the proper amount of lubrication they will probably last the life of this snowblower, because, believe this or not the are MADE IN THE U.S.A.!