Hi friend!
Today, I fired up my super reliable five-year-old Cub Cadet zero turn. It's taken a beating over the years, handling our rugged Ozark Mountain flourishing rock and brush garden “yard”. Despite my crazy mowing routines, it usually keeps up. But every once in a while, it needs some fixin’. Ha! Thank goodness my grandfather was a tinkerer. He had rebuilt a mower into a snowplow and a wood splitter from an old motorcycle for a couple of examples. He was pretty amazing! Could build anything. Today, I realized I must get this can do spirit from him. It doesn’t have to be pretty. It just needs to work! I brought the mower from the front yard to the back and when I turned it off, I noticed it was smoking and making a sizzling sound.
After some investigation, I found that a rubber hose had gotten slack in it and was resting on the exhaust muffler, catching the hose on fire. So, I can now add "catching the mower on fire” to my bucket list of life experiences! Fortunately, only the hose was affected. Yippee! Which after some further investigation looking over the parts diagram, who the heck put this on here like that?! It wasn’t even on the right side! WHERE IT BELONGS!!! Ummm… I am going to need your name and mower ID badge number stat. Ha just kidding. No wonder it caught fire! Thankfully its lasted all these years with no issues. 👏
I really needed to mow since our yard was almost calf-height from recent rains. So, I prayed about it and ended up using a spare washer hose pipe to splice the rubber hose back together. Thankfully this is just a vent hose, otherwise I’d be replacing the whole thing, so I taped that baby right back up with electrical tape and added a zip tie. Now, there's no slack, and I'm back in business!
I'm not the type of girl that knows the technical terms or that will have the perfect parts on hand. Living about 45 minutes away from the nearest parts store, I often use what I have available to fix things. If it's just a quick fix I need, I'll make do with what I've got. If it's really bad, I'll eventually get the right parts and fix it properly. But most of the time, I just need a quick solution to get my chores done and it’s mine and I am always learning as I go. It’s a win, win!
Yay! We did it!
XO- Amy
