summer off...slipping and sliding....

tal & kat next to the fix-it shop

i took the summer off unplanned, i had a class that started, june 27 thru sept 2..it is over so i am back blogging....

watch for new and unedited stories in the informal adventures of ronnie the repair guy...aka mr. fix-it....

he spent the summer on the slip n' slide with the kids!!!!

Looking for a heavy -duty vise.

We bought a vise for the fix-it shop about 15 years ago. We recently added a metal rolling table to the shop. Mr. Fix-it is going to rebuild a tranny soon and we redid this table to put the tranny on to roll it outside and work in the warmth and the sun if it ever gets here.....


So Mr. Fix-it wants to take our current vise apart and repaint , clean, re-lube it and put it back together.

I did not get a chance to get before pictures, but here are a few dismantled and a first coat of Bill Hirsch HI TEMP and HI GLOSS paint.

We started our hunt last Friday for an additional vise....all except 2 companies are made overseas....We started looking at several stores that we drove by on our trip through the city.  Everything we found on-line and in-stores was made in Chine, India, Malaysia.  We found one or two vise companies that still make their products in the U.S.A
I have requested information from them, there were no clear enough pictures on-line to see the quality so I have requested catalogs, I will keep you posted on that project. Also, the cost of the vises made in Asia all ran below $100.00 . The ones available in the U.S.A. all run between $200-$400. The Asian vises did not have removable pipe clenching jaws all the American made ones did.

The picture to the left is the base and spacer ring. Mr. Fix-it is going to do 2 coats before he bolts it on the new rolling transmission table.

I will keep you posted on how the search goes for the new vise for the bench in the shop. I actually had to resort to looking for a good used vise, because the stuff made 10 or 15 years ago is twice as heavy and double the quality. I think I may have found one in Rhode Island. It may be worth the couple hour drive......

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"...

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!

.

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.

  

INVENTORY DAY.......

Today started cold and sunny, almost like any other day in the frozen tundra we call the Northeast. We had several things on the top of the list today.....we need to change several 8 foot fluorescent bulbs in the shop and change an oil filter in one of our tenants furnace.

Mr. Fix-It and I enter the shop to the smell of gasoline .....we have a scooter in the shop for repair. The customer had left gas in it and ruined the carburetor. But in the time it was sitting in the shop the gasoline laced with ethanol literally ate thru the fuel line causing gasoline to leak on our floor in the shop. We clamped it off until we could get to the job. Remember with an average of 13% ethanol in the current gasoline sold here. it is natural corn based and absorbs water, hence the corrosion in all things carburated!

We never got to the inventory shelf today...

MADE IN USA

Mr. Fix-It and I have been struggling over the last several years with inferior parts for a wide variety of items we repair on a daily basis. Usually our repairs include power equipment and automotive items. We have found that whatever we buy that is made in a different country doesn't have the same quality as made here in U.S.A. I am not sure if the quality assurance is required but with the items that we buy we have noticed that there is a definite inferior quality to items made in China, Tiawan, Indonesia, Korea ect...I could go on with a very long list of countries we have noticed this from. Which brings me to an article I read recently that I will cite below in regards to our economy and putting the American people back to work.
BUY USA.....
A physics teacher in high school once told his students that while one grasshopper on the railroad tracks wouldn't slow a train at all, a billion of them would. With that thought in mind, read the following, obviously written by a good American.
Good Idea....one light bulb at a time.
Check this out. I can verify this because I was in Lowes the other day for some reason and just for the heck of itI was looking at the hose attachments. They were all made in China. The next day I was in Ace Hardware  and just for the heck of it I checked the hose attachments there. They were made in the U.S.A. Start looking. In our current economic situation, every little thing we buy or do affects someone else- even their job. So, after reading this email, I think this lady is on the right track. Let's get behind her.!
My grandson likes Hersheys candy. I noticed though that it is marked made in Mexico now. I do not buy it anymore. My favorite toothpaste Colgate is made in Mexico now. I have switched to Crest. You have to read the labels on everything.
This past weekend I was at Kroger. I needed 60 watt light bulbs and Bounce dryer sheets. I was in the light bulb aisle, and right next to the GE brand I normally buy was an off-brand labeled, "Everyday Value". I picked up both brands of bulbs and compared the stats, they were the same except for the price.  The GE bulbs were more money than the Everyday Value brand and was made, get ready for this- the USA at a company in Cleveland, Ohio!
So throw out the myth that you cannot find products you use everyday that are made right here in the USA  So on to another aisle- Bounce Dryer Sheets...yep, you guessed it, Bounce costs more money and is made in China. The Everyday Value Brand was less money and MADE IN THE USA! I did laundry yesterday and the dryer sheets performed just like the Bounce Free I have been using for years and at almost half the price!
Lay's stacked potato chipsin a can are made in Mexico. Good old Pringles made in the USA.
My challenge to you is to start reading the labels when you shop for everyday things and see what you can find that are made in the USA .- the job you save may be your own or your neighbors!
If you accept the challenge, pass this on to others so we can all start buying american, one light bulb at a time! Stop buying from overseas companies!
(We should have awakened a decade ago) Let's get with the program. Help our fellow Americans keep their jobs and create more jobs here in the USA.

                      

Which brings me to the long- winded point I am trying to make. We have been buying parts from Tecumseh for almost 30 years.  Tecumseh went out of business in October or November of 2008. They were in business in The USA for more than 105 years! What parts that are still available , which are few and far between have been made overseas, I am not sure when the company started outsourcing to other countries but this is what we have found with their parts.....you will see several pictures posted in this entry, a set of points and condenser, One package containing the points and condenser made in Taiwan and the other made in the Czech republic. We have received at least 6 or 8 sets of there for snowblowers this winter. Every set of points we received was defective, it is clear that there was no quality control. the contact area that cones together to form the spark was pressed in too far and at an angle so the contact s touching area was maybe 10% out of a possible 100%. We called customer service at our parts distributor to advise them of what we had found on the first couple of sets. A month later when we ordered several more sets we received the same thing, defective parts, made in another country.....
 We make up new swear words as we try to work with these inferior products and we try to modify them so we can at least get the job out, it is anti-productive.
If everyone tries to do this we can send a message to manufacturers!!! Please buy American!
                                     

The Mr. Fix-It shop.....

There is always something new in the shop.

Chrysler minivan coolant leak very hard to detect .....

Mr Fix-It and I have been working for several weeks on a mystery coolant leak in a Chrysler Minivan.....the van has been losing coolant but the customers have been unable to explain when and where the coolant is making its grand exodus from the system.....the customers are elderly and pretty clueless when it comes to anything mechanical. Mr. Fix-It has asked them to check the level of the overflow bucket because it was losing some coolant and he did not want it to overheat...they called in a panic wondering why the windshield was covered in an oily substance....they had filled the windshield fluid bucket with antifreeze!  The antifreeze was dripping everywhere....the side view mirrors were covered, it was in the door moldings, down the entire sides of the van.

The reason we could not pinpoint the leak was because the customers kept filling up the radiator but not using a funnel, and all the coolant was filling the k-member and was leaking randomly depending on how and where the van was parked. We finally found the leak....the van had been overheated so badly that the side tanks, which are plastic  let go ...we replaced with an OEM radiator  and so far so good. We have asked the customer NOT to open the hood if they need anything checked to please come and we will do it for them.  It was a real challenge trying to clean out the windshield washer bucket which was filled with antifreeze.                      

sunday dawned clear and sunny.....

the telephone was silent.