My lawn mower is a Lawn Boy M series mower. I bought it right after I get married so it is coming up on 25 years old. I will need to replace the starter pull again rope real soon, before it breaks. I completely wore out one set of tires on it, front and back. It was a challenge getting new tires since the hubs not just standard mower wheels. Especially in the back, where the drive wheels are. I have been through many blades since I like a sharp blade and the sharpening takes off metal.

It may well not be long for this world. The only issue I have had with it is the ignition module goes bad. It is buried in the mower and is a pain to replace. I may shop for a new mower this winter.

This 15 minute project WASN'T a waste of time!
Mrs WD can't start the leaf blower, so when she wants to use it she has to find me to start it for her. She hates that, she hates having to depend on me for such a simple thing so much that one time I found her sitting on the driveway with both feet on the mower, yanking on the starter rope with both hands. She was determined to start it or break it, and the way she was going she was more likely to break it.
So this morning I made a starter board for her.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1477925333.jpg

I saw the possibilities here.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1477925359.jpg

I got out the table saw and some scrap plywood and made a cradle for the blower.


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1477925396.jpg

The base is long enough for her to stand on while she pulls the rope. The blocks hold the blower in place.


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1477925437.jpg

As an added bonus I drilled a hole in the board so I can hang the blower up - no more wasted shelf space!

I no longer have a leaf blower (Apt living is grand) or my own garage to hang "stuff", but you are my new hero. That's fantastic! good job on several counts.

Time to resurrect this old chestnut.

We bought a wall clock at the second hand store to hang in our quilting room. At $2 it didn't seem like a bad deal, except when we got it home we found it lost an hour every day. I could have thrown it away and gotten a new Chinese clock for $18, but, well, I didn't. I ordered a new US made battery movement and set of hands that cost $28 with shipping and fixed the bugger. It feels good to save something rather than pitch and replace, but in the end I spent probably an hour on it and a good $10 more than I had to. At least now it is partly American made.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737595377.jpg

I had already fixed it when I took this picture. I just put the useless decorative "halo" on it to show what it looked like when I started.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737595377.jpg

I took the old motor apart to see what was in it. Plastic gears and a circuit board.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737595377.jpg

The new motor and two sets of hands were $18 - $28 with shipping. New chinese clocks are $18 to $20 on Amazon. But - Chinese .... Amazon .... No thanks.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737595377.jpg

All done, works great with American made motor!

About three years ago Vicki bought this Chinese wall clock at ReHome for $10. It doesn't work, but it looks pretty nice except for the cracked glass. She had me hang it on the dining room wall where it has been sitting silently, mocking me for three years.
After the success with the little guy I finally took it down to fix it.


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737595779.jpg

The clock is about 3 feet tall and the woodwork is pretty nice. When I tried to wind it I knew right away the mainspring was broken.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737595779.jpg


The mainspring for the time keeper was broken, as suspected, but the spring assembly that powered the chimes was identical and in good shape. Hmmm....

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737596526.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737596632.jpg

Just as I suspected. This clock was made with too many parts! Neither one of us wanted to listen to the chime sounding, so I swapped the spring assembly from the chime side of the movement into the clock side and got rid of all the junk assosiated with making the chime work.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737595779.jpg

It's a pretty crude mechanism, but it will work for as long as I need it to.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737595779.jpg

It is kind of soothing to hear the old clock ticking away, and more pleasant than I expected.

Good job. That wind up clock looks really nice.

Sent from my SM-S916U using Tapatalk

Damn, that clock looks great. What are the chances that it would have 2 mechanisms that you can pirate from to make one working clock...

I just had this exact conversation with myself. I pulled a few hundred nails, screws and lag bolts out of some half-rotten lumber that had been a play structure for my now grown children. Except I enjoyed it. Working in the January sunlight. Physical labor. Cut up the 2x4's and will burn them (maybe? Hoarder thinking???) and the 4x4's will become a potting bench.

Productive? Not at all. Satisfying? Yes. Rational? Not really.

Y'all are looking at this all wrong


It is not an utter waste of time. It is therapeutic

Try that on her next time she gives you any guff about wasting time on a worthless piece of junk.

"Honey, it is therapeutic for me." Try to look sincere as you say the line.

NFW that fails on an American female

I too struggle with things like this. I see a broken whatever and decide it can be fixed. I may have no need for the item but it needs fixing. I will try to fix anything before I buy a new one.

This is great. Yeah, if you start to look at your time as money, it looks expensive.

But not only are you not throwing stuff out, but you're also working your brain and hands both of which are good for you/us. And then there's the sense of satisfaction that comes from doing something successfully.

I understand that at times it's important to include the cost of your time in a calculation, but sometimes I think you can throw that out.

I'm going to use that line when my wife catches me looking at the Beautiful Women thread! I'm sure she'll understand!

My wife recently had shoulder surgery. She goes to physical therapy twice per week, and they assign her "home work" exercises. One of them uses a pulley to each hand, and she pulls her new shoulder up higher with the other hand to stretch the tendons and muscles. It has a little S shaped hook that is an 2 inches wide to hook over a door.

The plastic hook broke. I spent an hour in the garage hammering and bending a piece of aluminum into that shape, and then 30 minutes more lining the inside with a foam rubber sheet to prevent scratching the door. She could buy a replacement hook, made of metal, with a plastic coating on it for ten bucks delivered to the door.

It was all built of "stuff" I had in the garage, so the cost was nothing in materials, just my time. it will never break however.

Check this out. Guy uses thousands of dollars worth of tools to reimagine a POS workmate clone that's still kind of a POS when it's finished!

This guy gets it! :)

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Except for making plans, drawings, and measurements, (which is cheating in my book) he's a man after my own heart! He used all those expensive tools to make a really great top to mount on those spindly little legs. Yep Mike, he started with a POS and ended with a fancier POS.

Time spent repairing or modifying stuff with crap that's just laying around.
Here's 2 that I'm satisfied with. Maybe I've posted these.


The first is a mallet that was splitting so I banded it with hand-hammered copper, attached with copper nails.

The second is the handle to my bike work stand. The wood is just scraps of hard masonite.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737649626.jpg
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737649626.jpg

Aaaand, this morning I built this water trap so I can bleed the compressor without making a big mess in my garage. (that's a confession; I don't bleed my compressor often enough and quite a bit of water exits the tank when I do, ha ha)

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737650323.jpg

Plastic side tables on a hot grill is not a great idea.

Late last year my wife insisted we needed to replace the carpeting in the bedrooms of our house. She picked the carpet out all on her own.
It gets installed and about a month afterwards she asks why I haven't cleaned it yet as I'm the one who usually runs the vacuum. I had tried it when she wasn't home and our Shark vac was really hard to use on the new, semi-shag carpet compared to the old carpet. So, I got it out and said 'Here, you try it.'
That didn't go over well as then we needed a new vacuum too.
Fast forward to Christmas and we're visiting our son and his family and my wife mentions we need a new vacuum.
Our daughter-in-law says 'You're welcome to take our old vacuum, it doesn't work but maybe you can fix it. Our cleaning ladies bring their own and don't use it, so we don't need it any more.'
So, I get to bring home an old dirty vacuum.
I got around to taking a look at it and found all it needed was a deep cleaning itself. Once I got all the dog hair and dirt out of it, it works pretty good. So good in fact that my wife uses it instead of the Shark to vacuum the carpets now.
http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1737654045.JPG

Mike, you turned that mallet into a work of art! You can mount it on that board it’s lying on with a hammered copper strap and hang it on a wall.

I don’t necessarily struggle with it, but also like to make sure it’s at least good and broke before I buy a new one or call somebody to fix it. My wife called our washing machine “Lazarus” because I raised it from the dead so many times.

In the fall of '23 a South east storm ripped our 8 x 16 run in shelter for the horses off of its anchors, so I dismantled it.
Since then, some of the materials have been used to make a cold frame for my wife's gardening endeavors and a shed attached to the garage for the ride on mower, gas and diesel as well as other gas powered implements. The glass for the cold frame came from windows I had replaced a few years ago..
I still have some pressure treated pieces piled on a rack I made from, you guessed it, materials from the run in.
The fun never ends.

Best
Les

Next level waste-o-matic
 

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Our long arm quilting machine has a tiny little 2 1/2 inch wheel that is used to move the sewing mechanism manually when you are making timing and other adjustments. You have to pinch down on the OD of the knob, push it in to engage the clutch, and then rotate it to get the machine to turn. There is a lot of machinery in there, and it's a painful effin' bear for a guy with arthritis in his hands to turn it all. (this is an "after" picture)

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1743981243.jpg

So I made this little do-dad to screw onto the knob to make life easier. Yes, I nicked the edge of one of the holes with the end mill. I never claimed to be a machinist.


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1743981243.jpg


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1743981243.jpg

A perquisit was the fact that I needed a decent drill press to do work of this accuracy. The POS floor model in the barn was too old, too rusty, and the chuck was too inaccurate for this job, so I got to buy a new tool - a bench mounted drill press with a decent chuck!!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1743981243.jpg

A thread after my own heart. I am great at committing to fix something then about halfway into the project I realize what a PITA I signed up for and I b!tch for the remaining half. Every, single, time.:)

Because we come from a generation where stuff is not disposable. We fix stuff, heck look at our garages. We do most work ourselves and God knows (at least) i own more tools than some professional mechanics.

Take the piece you made off and just put a nice chamfer on the counter sunk holes. You can use a larger diameter drill bit if you don't have a chamfer tool. You really don't want those sharp edges of the countersinks around your fingers anyways.
Nice work.

Winter is still hanging on, so I might be being optimistic that we will have any vegetation to mow this year, but I'm getting prepared anyway.

The motorcycle battery on my brush mower was shot when I bought the mower a couple of years ago. Being a cheapskate, I've been rip starting in lieu of getting a new battery. I figured I could save myself some money and a lot of effort if I rigged up a mount to use the battery out of my irrigation system, which only gets used a few hours a year. While I was at it, I installed a hookup for a battery maintainer, because I know it's going to sit a lot. Works great!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1744130262.jpg

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1744130262.jpg

I've got a whopper of a time-suck project on the bench now. I'll report back in a week or so.

A month ago my wife informed me that the vacuum cleaner was broken and she bought a new one, ouch for a couple of hundred dollars. I asked what was broken, "the plug". Before the new one arrived via Basos express, I got myself down to the Home of Depot and got a replacement plug. Wired it up and hey ho presto, saved a couple hundo.

Back in the Fall, I accidentally knocked a clock off the wall in our laundry room. Of course the wife was going to throw it all away. I salvaged the internal bits and made this from a license plate I had while living on Oahu:

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1744133342.jpg

Many years ago I worked doing cleaning and maintenance at a police department and a co worker did the city hall building and was always having ground pins breaking from the cord plug so I would replace them for him.

I always asked him if he was yanking the cord to unplug it “No” was always the answer... until one night I walked over looking for him and just as I was opening the door to the offices, there he was giving the cord a hard tug from the other side of the room- yup, not surprised at all.

For me, its weeding the landscape beds. I've gotten behind and even with much lower than normal rainfall, weeds are perma grow.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around leaves falling in the spring vice FALL here in San Antonio. And they don't seem to relent. Three weekends in a row I've blown and bagged those EFFEN things. Red or Live Oak, I'm not sure.

I bill my time for me and my truck @ $135 a hour, $60 for the car hauler. So $195 for me, truck and car hauler. I get $90 for my wheeled loader and my excavator I charge $100. For larger jobs such as waterproofing a basement (2-3 day job) I work out a deal.

Vicki is an incredibly creative person - always having ideas about stuff. Often, though, when she says, "Yanno, it would be cool if we did 'this'." It means, "It would be cool if you did this for me." And so it was when she suggested we turn one of the dozen old sewing machines we have lying around into a lamp. As luck would have it, some guy had given up on the same kind of project and was selling the half finished pile of parts on FB Marketing. It was a sewing machine that was way cooler than anything we had, so $25 later, yaayyy?

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1745158161.jpg

The box of parts contained a White shuttle bobbin machine. White stopped making this type of machine in about 1900 so this dates from sometime in the late 19th Century.

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1745158161.jpg

This is how it looks after cleaning, polishing, painting, and applying decals that I had to order from Australia.


http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1745158964.jpg


It's ready for Vicki to do the hard part - buying a lampshade. :D

That's S... King cool. (But does she realize that this project is stealing time from the Speedster?)

Maybe some antique spools and bobbins and the appropriate thread color for that finishing touch? Even a little sample of stitched fabric under the needle...

Yeah, Vic says she has some wooden thread spools that she's going to put on it.

I'm working on the Speedster on the triple A plan. As Arthritis Allows. I can only endure bending, twisting, grasping - making the kind of motions your body has to make to work on a car - a little at a time.

If you want to see AUWofT wait till I post a pic of what this widget does!




http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1745188804.jpg

Done!

My latest UWofT is shop vac tool storage!

http://forums.pelicanparts.com/uploa...1745350656.jpg