Mower Repair

 

                About a month ago, our neighbor showed up in the back yard with an old electric corded mower he had found on the street. I’d been looking for an electric mower for the school garden, so the timing was excellent. We tried it out at home and it worked. We pushed it over to school and it worked for one clump of grass, then stopped. Mark eyed it and pushed it home. “If I can get the top off, maybe I can see what’s wrong,” he mused. It was worth a try.

                Getting the top off was not as easy as it looked. The screws had rusted in place. He gave them a blast of some chemical that breaks up rust and tried two days later. No luck.  “I my need to drill them out—but I don’t have the tool,” he told me. We pushed it under the awning of the greenhouse and I squeezed by it for a couple of weeks.

                Last weekend the same neighbor was over helping me take off the side of the oven with his electric drill. Once the oven was free, he wandered outside with Mark. The drill was in hand, so they tried it. No luck. They wrestled with the mower for about an hour, but failed to shift the screws. However, he did tell Mark what to buy to drill it out. Two days later, we were on a Wilco run for mulch and Mark made a few purchases for the mower.

                That afternoon, he drilled the screws out and lifted the lid. After about an hour of cleaning out dead grass and dust and wiggling the wires, he tried it out. Success! The mower roared to life. He dropped the blade down to the lowest settling and mowed the entire yard. “I feel a little sinful,” he told me. (He mows with a hand reel mower). The mower cut beautifully—so crisp and even. And the basket in the back—which the cat loves to claw!—gathered all of the trimmings to mulch the recently planted tomato crop.  We were thrilled.

                It is not the stove—but it is a small repair victory.

The Norge

 

     

           We have a very old stove—a Norge from the 1950s. Over the years, Mark has, in consultation with a hardware store in Portland that knows old appliances, kept it working. But, right now, he’s a bit stuck. There are now four challenges to be dealt with.

                The first and second are in the oven. The thermostat blew on it about a month ago. That’s not a huge deal; we can buy a new one and install it. But the roof has begun to corrode and the broiler is hanging down (which is probably why the thermostat went). So, in order to fix the oven, we need to fix the roof and find a new bracket for the broiler.  We have a small oven which bakes a loaf of bread, a pie, or a quarter sheet pan of roasting veg, so we are still eating. But, I miss the efficiency of the big batch big oven. And cookies. I don’t want to fiddle with a quarter sheet pan for cookies.

                The third relates to a burner—one of the big ones. The switch that regulates the heat has broken and it is a seven wire switch. This doesn’t sound like a big deal to me, but it is. There are lots of standard five wire switches out there but no seven. I suspect the Portland guys would know what to do with this, but Mark is still formulating questions about amps and circuits to ask them. He’s been a little nervous about measuring amps since he fried his little measuring gadget by using it wrong a few years ago.  Because I have spent so many years on a camp stove with two burners I’ve been ok with three. But the dead one is my favorite closest to the chopping and rolling spot.  I want it back.

                The fourth is the result of having young cats. One of them caught a rodent and brought it in one night. It set up housekeeping in the side of the stove, coming out at night to eat the cat food. If the oven had been working, it would have been driven out pretty quickly, but it wasn’t. And then I put off moving the stove away from the wall for cleaning for an extra week. It was gross. Mark left the house when I went to take the side panel off because he was afraid of asbestos and lung cancer. I kept going. The insulation that I pulled out was white and fluffy—remarkably new looking. I think someone had reinsulated the stove before we moved in. However in order to clear up the mess, I took out all of the insulation from the left side. Now that needs to be replaced.

                And you could ask—which Mark did, in the middle of the rat pee in the side of the stove debacle yesterday—why we don’t just Buy a New Stove? This is partly aesthetics. The stove has a sturdy, long lasting charm that fits into our very low tech kitchen perfectly. The oven is huge. It is electric, not gas, so it can be powered by our solar panels. It is simple. It’s a beast. And the other part is pride.  We can keep this thing going. It’s going to take some work and some research, but it will last far longer than a new stove. Reduce. Reuse. Repair. Rewire.