Wilton Grinding wheel.....

We bought this grinding wheel for Mr. Fix-its shop in 2002. Mr. Fix-it modified it right away to change one side to an eight inch braided wire wheel. We are getting ready for our lawnmower season in a couple of weeks and the eight inch wheel has been reduced to a six inch wheel over the last 7.5 years.  The picture below shows the worn wheel....we are going to replace it but we are going to recycle this used one to a friend or family member, it should still be useful to someone....

The wheel we have now was made in U.S.A. I am going to hunt around to see if I can find a replacement made in the U.S.A.  I will keep you posted.


As an asides:

My sister and I had a discussion the other day that has me thinking ,she knows that I blog about items made here and abroad and the quality of those items.....she now sells a product that has to be manufactured by hand by a person. She currently has someone in the U.S.A. handcrafting this item for her for $6.00 and the materials cost her $3.00...so for a total of $9.00 outlay she sells the item for $27.95. Making about $19.00 an item. She met a gentleman several weeks ago that has stuff produced in Bangladesh, he saw her item, and said to her " give me a sample and I will have it quoted for you...I can probably get them made for .40 cents a piece including material...."

How can you fight the thoughts of making so much more money per item? The lure of the dollar....that is why manufacturing is going down the tubes in the U.S.A. American workers want to make a high wage per hour and want all the benefits and don't want to work that hard....admit it, it is true.

What can we as people do about this?

Ethanol problems again.....

 problems again with leaving gas in a piece of equipment.....

this time it is a craftsman blower.....another name for equipment made by this manufacturer in this shop is "crapsman".......there is a chronic unavailability of parts and if the parts are available they are usually of low quality.....we ordered jackshafts for a craftsman riding lawnmower several years ago at 175$ apiece time two jackshafts and installed them, the customer took the machine home, driving the machine off of the trailer to start cutting his lawn they seized up....the customer brought it back to Mr. Fix-it, we dismantled it and found that there was no grease packed into either jackshaft from the factory.....they were sealed so there is no way we could have greased them if we tried........i am off on a tangent....back to the blower...............

This customer left gas in this trimmer.....it is 2 cycle gas.....i don't think it would have mattered either way, but the carburetor was compromised, the internal parts of the carburetor were damaged, the rubber parts and any aluminum was pitted by the chemical reaction.....which means a new carburetor.

So, we have a trimmer that costs $100.00 brand new.....Mr. Fix-it has put a $40.00 carburetor on it, changed a spark plug , and a few other basic stuff and thrown an hour at it anyway. Never mind the research to get the part number for the new carb and you basically have exceeded the cost for a brand new blower......

welcome to our "throw-away society"...

more humor......

funny one....

It was the first day of school and a new student, the son of a Japanese businessman, entered the fourth grade. The teacher greeted the class and said, "Let's begin by reviewing some American history. Who said "Give me Liberty, or give me death?"


She saw only a sea of blank faces, except for that of Toshiba, who had his hand up. "Patrick Henry, 1775," said the boy.

"Now," said the teacher, "Who said 'Government of the people, by the people, for the people shall not perish from the earth?"

Again, no response except from Toshiba: "Abraham Lincoln, 1863."

The teacher snapped at the class, "You should be ashamed. Toshiba, who is new to our country, knows more about it than you do."

As she turned to write something on the blackboard, she heard a loud whisper: "Damned Japanese."

"Who said that?" she demanded.

Toshiba put his hand up. "Lee Iacocca, 1982," he said.

Grammas Bernina Sewing Machine

My grandmother is 92 going on 42....she is a ball of fire.....

She still works part-time and sews alot....she sews for a local pet supply store , usually cat nip toys....her latest product for them was red lobsters...the color sticks with Mr. Fix-it because when he finally convinced Gram she could trust him with her BERNINA, thats all he found loaded inside all the panels her removed to try and figure out why the needle was striking the base plate. There was so much residual red felt that it was forcing the needle forward striking the base plate...

Gram brought this same machine to the local Bernina dealer last year they charged her $162.00. It still did not work as she had hoped. It took the prospect of another large cleaning bill to convince her to let Mr. Fix-it look at it.....

Mr. Fix-it took all the access panels off the machine. He used air gently to blow all the fabric dust from all the dark corners he lubed what needed lubricating and put it all back together, noting that 2 bulbs were burned out. They are a special bulb, acquired from the dealer only...of course. We called the dealer , they are about 20 miles away. We went there, they could not locate them, and all their tech's were at sewing machine repair school in Kentucky (is there such a thing?)

It took us another trip several weeks later to secure these bulbs. We got her 2 extras also. Guess what they cost each?  $4.....OMG...

We are going over to Grammas later today to install them for her...Mr. Fix-it called her to let her know we would be over.....she said "It's about time!..."  and "am I going to owe you for the repair bill?"

This is a rare picture of smiling Gram and our niece, Tal.

Toyota Highlander front wheel bearing growling.....

Finally after the holidays and school vacations have passed we are finally to squeeze in what we anticipate to be a 2+ day job replacing the front wheel bearings on the 2003 Toyota Highlander we diagnosed over a month ago.....

The first thing to come off is the nut for the sway bar link......what do you think happens? Well, we are in the liquid calcium capital of the world....New England. They are rusted in place....we have to cut them off.....the truck came in on Thursday and we purchased all the parts we thought we would need, but there are going to be parts we could not anticipate such as these sway bar bolts. We have a very good rapport with out local Toyota dealer, so we get him on the telephone right away and let him know what we need and we will probably be calling him again before the day is out. 

Next the caliper bolts come out and it is tied off entirely to the inner fender liner , the ABS sensor is disconnected....and

Notice the bearing assembly to the right , only one side was growling, but a good rule of thumb is to replace both because just when one is done the other side will go bad, MURPHY'S LAW.

Mr. Fix-it uses the 20-ton press his grandfather built and his father painted in the 50's to push these rusted bad boys out and hones out the residual rust and starts re-assembly. Remember from an earlier post that we use anti-sieze in this shop religiously. So we paint it on and all is re-assembled. The only other victim in this scenario was the dust covers for the ABS tone ring. Apparently at the local dealer once they rip them off, they are very soft, almost aluminum -like and technicians cant be bothered to reinstall them ?^&*&...why not? I think they hope ABS sensor goes bad so they can get more work into their shops. It takes another minute or two to reinstall them and only a few dollars apiece to replace them.....we are not looking for any more in the shop right now, so we aren't going to try and create it.....

Putting this back together goes more smoothly than taking it apart. While the strut tower was out Mr. Fix-it also changed the castle nuts along with installing new stainless steel cotter pins so when the lower ball joints go bad, and they eventually will, he can get them out easily.  Because with it all together it would be almost impossible to get these rusted parts out....a little preparation ahead for a job that will probably be done down the road.

Toilet, Tenant, Time.... Too Much and Too little......

Too much to do and too little time to do it......

I went into the basement of one of our rental houses, a house Mr. fix-it and I also live in.....there is water coming through the floor and it sounds like the water is running......I am somewhat panicked. Since getting new tenants 1 year ago we have had to deal with an array of problems.....the tenants are very nice but a bit absent-minded.....

Last week I had to call them to tell tham that their bedroom window was open about 6 inches to the outside, it was in the single digits and snowing outside , it did not seem to bother them that it was freezing outside and all their heat was literally getting burned up and was flying out the window.....
In the summer they were running the two 5000 watt air conditioners in their windows while other windows in the apartment were wide open.....?*(&^^
Several weeks ago I went downstairs in the front hallway to get the mail, it was maybe 20 degrees in the hallway, the door to their apartment was wide open and noone was mailto:.....@#$%^&&&

I cannot figure them out, they are only in their early 60's??? Maybe pre-Alzheimers??? They make me somewhat nervous.

The latest escapade is the water coming through the floor.... I go upstairs and bang on the back door, I hear someone coming. The door is opened and I greet Mrs. Tenant and her 2 year old granddaughter.  I go right in to the bathroom, Mrs. Tenant says that the tiolet will flush but solids won't go down, they have to plunge constantly..... I take the tank cover off and look in, all looks okay, I get down on my hands and knees and start looking.....almost immediately I see something in the throat of the toilet. I reach in and pull out a clear plastic fork...the tines are facing out.  I fish it out and show it to Mrs. Tenant...she says" how did that get in there?"....I look at her and say " Maybe the 2 year old?" Mrs Tenant says "can't be..." .....I disagree.....i was young once I remember flushing alot of stuff down the toilet that did not belong in the toilet.

I tell Mrs. Tenant that I will check with her again tomorrow to see how it is flushing.....
 

road trip to marthas vineyard ......

We had a seminar on the south shore on Friday so we decided to take a couple of days and visit some friends/customers on Marthas Vineyard..
Our first stop was to check out my sisters boat which she leaves parked at her friends house in West Tisbury...the gas cans were still full and her battery was still in the boat, it is 8 degrees with 12 " of snow on the ground......will this boat run in the spring? ...probably not....
We empty the fuel out of the two five gallon gas cans, but we cannot run it now there is no access to water...lets keep our fingers crossed...although I am sure that won't help.
We don't remove the battery because her friend is in Puerto Rico for the winter and all the buildings are locked up so there is no way to leave it, it looks like she may be buying a battery in the spring..^%$&^#@@@

Our next stop is Our friend Johns house. We dropped in on him last night and he asked us to help him with a project. A tree limb has fallen in the parking lot of Alleys General Store ( this is the oldest continually running mercantile in the country) his family owned it for generations and he still sorts the mail over there, but it was sold to the Marthas Vineyard Preservation Trust years ago...it is a very eclectic and cool place, although the prices are a bit steep... the last time this Homelite chainsaw was run was the last time we ran it....we cut some bushes on the side of his house with it...he says 5 years ago, I will bet it is closer to 10 years ago. See the picture to the right , if you look closely you can see our clotherpin repair.....
Mr. Fix-it first checks to see if there is fuel in it, there doesn't appear to be. He then checks and fills the bar oil. The throttle lever is flopping around so we have to improvise....to hold the throttle open we stick a clothespin to prop open the throttle...Mr. Fix-it tries to pull it over, it sputters several times then it catches., and then it stalls...finally it is running but the chain is not spinning. One side of the chain is free but the other side is rusted to bar, we pry it out with a screwdriver and work the chain back and forth until it is free. Mr. Fix-it takes the handle apart and finds that the throttle cable has come undone...thankfully it is not broken. He reattaches it and puts it back together. Now for a test run, John gets a piece of wood....it starts very slowly to cut through and continues very slowly.....the chain is so dull that it is smoking, it will not cut. The fallen tree over at Alleys will not be cut today. It is Sunday on Marthas Vineyard and the old adage is "Slow down you're on-island".....meaning nothing is open today so you won't get a new chain and you won't get anyone th sharpen your old one....not today and maybe not anytime soon. Islanders march to their own drummers.

This last picture is of an interesting barn in Edgartown a garage on each side and living quarters above , a very nice-looking structure.....it would be a cool fix-it shop.

LIVE GOOD,
deb

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!

.

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.!

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.