This was actually a pretty productive weekend, considering Kirsten's been visiting a friend in Calgary (I'm usually slow as hell when working without Kirsten on house stuff).

I spent most of Saturday running around, trying to get parts for the lawnmower Kirsten's Dad donated to us. It's an old Craftsman 19" / 3.5 hp mower, and when I tried it out a few days ago, it wouldn't start.

So Saturday, I stopped by the closest lawnmower shop and tried to get parts for it. It took me 4 trips and two different lawnmower shops to get the parts I needed. I went back to the first shop three times.

The first time I was there, I told the parts guy that I had a Craftsman mower that wouldn't start, and asked what he'd suggest I do to fix it. He said there wasn't much he could tell me without the model number of the mower's engine. I told him it was a 19" Craftsman with a 3.5 hp motor. He told me there were many, many motors that fit that description.

On my second visit, I brought in the carburator assembly, thinking that he could identify the motor by that, or at least look at the carb and give me parts for it. Alas, no such luck. I had to go back and search the engine cowling for an engraved number. Thankfully, the shop was only a few blocks from home, so I didn't have to drive for more than a few minutes to get there and back.

I finally found the number, and made trip number 3 to the lawnmower shop. The guy looked up the number, tapped a bunch of information into the screen, disappeared into the back....... and told me that he didn't have anything in stock, and it would take a couple of weeks to get the parts in.

*sigh*

I told him I'd think about it and let him know if I wanted to order the parts.

In the meantime, I took a trip to another lawnmower shop I knew of that was a little farther away. They had everything I needed, except for the most important part - a small extension spring that opens and closes the throttle automatically.

At first, when visiting the first lawnmower shop, I thought that the entire throttle handle and cable were missing. It didn't dawn on my until I was in Canadian Tire (looking at a new lawnmower) that the mower I had didn't need a throttle cable -- it was automatically positioned by the mower.

I was jazzed. I now had almost everything to get the mower back into working condition. However, I still needed that spring. I managed to find something *close* at Home Depot (where all our hard-earned money goes), and raced back home.

I cleaned and rebuilt the carburator, put the mower back together, and attached the new string...

And then it was time to test it!

...

...

and it didn't work.

Damn.

It then occurred to me that the motor wasn't getting ANY gas. It turned out that, after all this work, the problem was with the gas tank: something was clogging the line.

I stuck a nail up the clogged nozzle, put everything back together again... and lo and behold it worked.

Sorta.

There was still an issue with the throttle, because the spring I got from Home Depot was a little longer than the original string. As a result, the throttle wasn't opening enough and it wasn't getting up to full throttle.

However, if I move the throttle by hand to full open, it works pretty well.

It started, and I made a victory call down to Calgary to let Kirsten know I'd beat the beast.

After talking with her for awhile, I tried to start it up again. And it wouldn't start. I tried and tried and tried... and it wouldn't start again. It just kept spitting out gas, but no spark took. I took the night off, and decided to go out and get a new mower in the morning.

Sunday morning, after taking the dog for her swim, I decided I'd give the mower one more try, just in case. It occurred to me that the mower might be flooded, so I decided to just keep on trying to start it until something happened.

And finally, it did. It sputtered to life. I reached down and gave it a little throttle and it roared to full power.

Even better, it started a second time... and a third. I was happy to not have to spend another $160 on a new mower, and started mowing our back lawn.

And then it started raining. Good, solid, West Coast-style rain. I didn't care - my mower was working! I mowed the back lawn, the front lawn, and the lawn in front of the house on the sidewalk.

As an aside, Cayce thinks the lawnmower is evil incarnate. She kept lunging towards it as I was mowing, snapping at its wheels, and barking her little head off. Eventually, she gave up and left it alone... but kept a strict watch on the lawnmower to make sure it wasn't doing anything *too* evil.

I weed-whacked the edges, trimmed the hedges along the side, and laid a new path with stepping stones along the side of the house, where once there was only dirt (and before that, a concrete path that was removed when we had our foundation reparied).

And at 10, I collapsed in front of the TV to watch a little mindless entertainment (in this case, an episode of Faking It on TLC, where they remade a shy, reserved librarian into a Cowboy Coyote Ugly bartender. Yes, I feel shame) before climbing into the tub and scrubbing myself clean.