Check Out my New Hoopty

I did something amazing today. I bought something that wasn’t used.

I haven’t bought a new car since 2003. I was starting out in law, and I decided I wanted the most fun car possible within my budget. Had to be a ragtop. I considered two options: the Porsche Boxster and the Ford Thunderbird.

At this point, a reasonable person could question my orientation. The T-Bird was not a manly motorhead’s car, and the Boxster was an invitation to gay jokes.

I wanted a roadster. It had to be somewhat fast. It had to be fun. It had to have style. Both of these cars fit the bill. The Boxster looked the way the 911 should have looked, and the T-Bird was gorgeous from the front, if a little dumpy from the rear. The T-Bird was not a serious car, so it was okay that it looked a little silly from some angles.

The Boxster differed from the T-Bird in that Porsche made sure it was an actual performance car. Ford shoved a weird, tiny, high-compression V8 into the T-Bird, and after that, it pretty much gave up. You could hope for 6.7 seconds from zero to sixty, which was pretty good, and it was pleasant in corners, but there was no point in taking it to a track. And Ford gave it a transmission that could not handle more than 300 horsepower, so upgrading it was not an option unless you wanted to gut it.

The nice thing about the T-Bird was that when people saw you in one, they didn’t assume you secretly admired Hitler. It didn’t project “GERMAN CAR-OWNER INSECURITY.” They knew you had a sense of humor.

You had to. It was full of engineering bugs. For example rainwater filled cavities on top of the coil-on-plug assemblies and killed them. To open the trunk, you had to insert a key behind the driver’s seat. It was impossible to open the doors with the windows up, so the car lowered them a little when you tried. Also, the trunk-mounted battery’s ground tended to come loose.

After that, I got a used Dodge pickup, and the car I drive now is a Ford I inherited when my dad died. Nice enough car. The price was right.

Actually, it was used when he got it. He was declining, and his old Ford was dying. I knew he liked it, and I figured we would get a newer model because he was familiar with it. We didn’t want to pay the new price, but we did want a big corporation we could sue if something went wrong. I took him to Carmax.

Anyway, I don’t like the idea of buying new big-ticket stuff unless it makes economic sense. Or, okay, I’m just cheap.

I bought my compact tractor, a garden tractor, and an E-Z-GO used when I moved to this house. I got a screaming, smoking deal on the lot. The compact is going strong and probably will be when I die. The garden tractor still runs, but it’s not a great mower, it breaks down a lot, and John Deere doesn’t support it, so I replaced it. Now I’m getting a new cart.

I replaced the old mower, a John Deere 430, with a used Kubota ZD326 zero-turn.

The 430 was made in around 1991. I have no idea how many hours it has on it, because the meter has not moved since I bought it. Back when it was new, it cost almost $10,000, which would be more like $25,000 now.

Very few homeowners bought them. Most JD mowers you will see are cheap demi-fakes from Home Depot and Lowe’s. Flimsy construction. Cheap gas engines. The 430 has a Yanmar diesel and two PTO’s, plus front and rear hydraulics. You can even put a three-point hitch on it.

I have tried to find out why anyone would have bought a 430 for mowing in 1990, given that zero-turns were available. The web says good zero-turns didn’t exist until after 2000, so that must be the answer.

The ZD326 I bought was made in about 2007, soon after they came out, and apart from a few engineering mistakes, it’s fantastic. Tough. Fast. Extremely durable. Easy to use. But because I bought it used, I suffered a lot.

The deck was my main problem. It has 4 upright tubes; one at each corner. They hold anti-scalp wheels. Kubota designed the tubes so various carbon steel parts would weld themselves inside them if they got wet and rusted.

When I bought the mower, I didn’t realize the rear pins (scalp wheel shafts) were frozen place, nor did I know remnants of the old front pin bushings were stuck inside the tubes as though they had been cast there.

I spent hours in the sun, drilling, sawing, grinding, and so on, and I finally got everything out. It was horrible. I modified some of the parts so they were superior to the designs Kubota’s inept engineers provided, and they should outlast me now.

The mower also had a fuel issue. It had two diesel tanks, and apparently, the owner never used the left one, because when I tried, the mower used to lose power over and over. Evidently, algae or whatever was growing somewhere in the system. I took the fuel tank off and cleaned it, and in the process, the plastic rear fender under which it sat shattered. The sun had made it brittle, and it didn’t like me pulling on it to get the tank out.

I installed two new fenders, and I kept putting chemicals in the diesel until the fuel issue went (mostly) away.

I would guess I have $7000 in my $5000 used mower now. I don’t recall for sure.

I am fairly certain it’s a good mower now. It’s a blast to use, compared to a tractor, and the only parts that can cause serious problems are the engine and the transmission. The engine will run 6,000 hours in normal use, and it seems jim-dandy, so I think it will work out great. I’ve put maybe 25 hours on it, and the oil still looks as clean as peanut oil. The transmission works, and if it doesn’t, it can be fixed. Probably not by me, because I am fed up, but it can be done cost-effectively.

When I started looking for a new cart, my wife told me not to buy any more used junk. She remembers seeing me come in the house day after day, filthy and angry, after working on the mower.

My original cart is an old gas E-Z-GO Workhorse with a bench seat, a dump bed, a lift kit, and a two-cylinder Subaru air-cooled engine. Two-wheel drive. I first drove it when my dad and I visited this property before he bought it. The owner turned it over to us, and off we went, all over the farm.

I knew nothing about carts, so when it topped out at maybe 7 miles per hour, I thought it had to be normal. I wasn’t bothered. I figured people who farmed weren’t in a hurry.

After I bought it, I learned a few things. Like the JD, it had an hour meter stuck in another decade. I have never seen it change. I found out the speed was not normal. It should have been able to push 20. Eventually, I noticed that it gave off blue smoke in reverse. To be truthful, it smoked in forward, too, but I didn’t notice because when the cart moved forward, I drove out of the smoke instead of into it.

One day, I finally got around to checking the oil, and I found the dipstick was just about bare. I thought I had fried the rings.

I found out the carb was messed up from years of ethanol and idleness. I also found out the rings were fine. The oil had gone out through the valve seals. The engine had worn them until the holes were egg-shaped, leaving gaps between the valves and seals. As the engine ran, oil squirted out through the gaps, and somehow, some of it got into the exhaust and burned. This is a known fault with this engine.

Before I knew what was wrong, I started looking for engines. How much could a tiny Subaru engine be? Thousands. That’s how much. And they don’t make them now, so forget that. You can buy a rebuilt one and ship your old one to the seller, which is an expensive hassle, or you can drop in a Honda (Predator, come on) which isn’t really designed for low-speed cart use.

Anyway, I fixed the seals. I also worked on the carb more than once. I found that regardless of whether I used no-corn gas, the cart was likely to refuse to start after a few weeks of rest. It rarely ran well. When it did, it often took a long time to start.

I broke the OEM carb while fixing it, and for years, I’ve been using a Chinese carb that doesn’t seem quite up to snuff. I eventually found an OEM carb at a great price, but I have not installed it.

The cart rides like a rock. My farm is bumpy, and a ride in the cart feels like getting hit in the rear end with a sledgehammer over and over. It’s also underpowered, so you have to be careful not to stop with anything like a rock or fallen tree in front of the tires.

When it runs, it’s generally okay. That’s the nicest thing I can say. It’s very useful. Indispensable.

Now I have a family. We have acres of land we should be using for recreation. I can’t put 4 people in this little cart. I know; there are only three of us now, but that’s temporary, and besides, we get guests. I can’t make them run beside the cart.

The cart also has a differential leak. I didn’t mention that. I took off one day without tightening some wheel lugs, and a wheel came off, somehow ruining a seal. I have been avoiding using the cart until the seal is fixed, and I have been avoiding fixing it.

I am tired of gas problems. I am tired of wondering if the cart will start. I would like to get in a cart, push the pedal, and take off. Maybe I’m too demanding, but to me, that means diesel. A new diesel cart. With 4 seats. And a hydraulic dump bed, because the cart is useless without that.

I suppose I would be fine if I bought a gas cart, but what if I’m wrong? I really don’t want to pull any more carbs. I don’t want to drain a tank because I’m afraid the gas is too old. I don’t want an engine that will have to be rebuilt in 5 years because gas engines are junk.

Electric is not even in the game. I need ground clearance and 4-wheel drive. I have woods. Electric carts are made to take old people to Sam’s Club on smooth pavement.

Diesel. Decision made.

It came down to a couple of choices. Kubota or Kawasaki. Kubota makes a 4-seat cart with a hydrostatic transmission and four-wheel drive. Kawasaki makes what it calls a “mule,” with a cheaper, cart-typical transmission that uses a belt.

I ended up going with Kubota. I don’t know if I did the right thing.

The Kawasaki is faster, but you can’t go faster than 10 miles per hour on my grass without risking a broken axle, and I don’t have any opportunities to go out on the road, so the Kubota’s top speed of 25 is more than ample.

Both carts have dump beds that can be temporarily shortened to set up rear seats, and the Kawasaki’s bed is supposed to be quicker to change. The Kawasaki holds more weight in the bed, and it tows more. On the other hand, I will never be able to use the full capacity of the Kubota, and I don’t really see myself towing more than 1300 pounds with a cart.

The Kubota should be bulletproof. A multi-decade purchase, at least. Can’t say that about the Kawasaki.

Here’s an annoying difference: the Kawasaki only comes in black. Why? The body will reach 3,000 degrees in the Florida sun.

Carts are very, very expensive now. I don’t care. I have a bunch of landscaping jobs I’ve been putting off, the E-Z-GO has to live up to its name and GO, I need a cart ASAP, and I want something that will never give me half a second’s trouble. I need it to last as long as I do. I think buying the Kubota was a smart move. I’m buying peace of mind. Let the wise guys in their Kawasakis zip past me and sneer if they want. Not that this is possible on a private farm, but still.

I think I paid too much. It appears to be impossible to find out what a Kubota dealer pays for anything. I tried. It can be confusing just trying to calculate the MSRP for a cart with a given configuration. I did my best, took what I thought was an unrealistic percentage off, and made an offer. They accepted it within a few minutes and even rounded it down eleven dollars to the nearest hundred.

I’ll bet they have an office party tonight.

I’m not concerned. I used to be the guy who tortured car dealers (similar to equipment dealers) for days to get the last penny of savings. I enjoyed it. As a Christian, I now feel that God will bless me if I let people profit a little more than I have to. At least I didn’t take the insanely high number they offered in the first place.

I wish I had bought a new diesel mower. I would have paid around $20,000, which is quite a bit, but the cost of hiring someone would amount to several times that over time. A gas mower would not work as well, it would be subject to clogs, and the engine would have to be rebuilt or replaced in a few years. Also, it would use a lot more fuel, so more annoying trips to the BP station, followed by more standing in the sun filling the mower, trying not to get even more diesel on my work boots.

If I had bought a new diesel mower, I would be paying about 60% more than most people would consider reasonable under the circumstances. Even affluent homeowners are unlikely to buy anything more expensive than a $13,000 gas Scag. But that peace of mind…it would be worth it. Over a new gas mower, I mean.

The used diesel is another matter. Benefits of buying new: I would have saved myself a lot of very unpleasant work, and I wouldn’t have any concerns that the transmission might poop out and cost me several thousand dollars.

When I get on the mower from now on, I’ll tell myself, “It may die today, but if not, you saved $13,000.”

I truly look forward to using the new cart. Turning the key and expecting nothing bad to happen will be a marvelous experience.

Typical

I have been thinking about leadership.

The universe is not a big partnership. It’s a patriarchal hierarchy with our male God at the top and Satan at the very bottom. Everyone except God submits to someone. I suppose the reason God doesn’t have to submit is that he submits to his own perfect nature. There is no point in submitting to a ruler when everything you do is perfect.

A proper marriage is not a partnership. The husband and father is the leader, and everyone else is supposed to submit to him; they owe him support and obedience. It’s for their good more than his.

It’s very sad that feminism has been mainstreamed in the church. There are many preachers that acknowledge the Holy Spirit yet claim husbands and wives are equals. As my wife put it, they “apologize” for Ephesians 5:23:

For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body.

Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in every thing.

There is no ambiguity there. You can’t “clarify” this by looking to other verses for reference. It stands on its own, impossible to contradict with other scripture. The husband is the boss, not an anarchist who takes turns running things. Not a slave who is forced to provide and protect without having a voice.

If you’re a wife, you are supposed to be subject to your husband in all things.

Feminist Christians love to point to 5:21, which describes Christians as submitting to each other, but that is in a different passage about a different subject. It’s about Christian life outside of marriage. It means we shouldn’t be pushy self-promoters; the kind of insufferable people who start running for office in the first grade. In our interactions with Christians outside the home, we should not force our decisions on others or appoint ourselves to positions of power; we should be humble and wait for promotion.

The word doesn’t say every woman has to submit to every man, and Ephesians 5:23 isn’t intended to be a rigid law. It’s a principle. It doesn’t mean you should obey your husband if he asks you to help him build a bomb to blow up a school. It means that if your husband is led by the Holy Spirit, you should submit to him.

“What if he’s not led by the Holy Spirit”? Then you married the wrong person, so you have no one but yourself to blame if your husband is a heathen. You’re going to have to build up your own relationship with the Holy Spirit and do your best, accepting the fact that you’re in a hole you dug for yourself.

It is hard to give advice to people who are stuck in very bad situations they created. It’s obvious that I should advise single people to avoid marrying heathens, but once the marriage is in place, there are no simple answers.

It’s important to note that disagreement with you isn’t proof your husband isn’t listening to the Holy Spirit, so you shouldn’t tell yourself that lie in order to excuse your family-killing rebellion.

Another important thing: submitting only when your husband agrees with you is not submission. I had to tell my wife that several times.

Say you want to paint your kitchen green, and your husband wants yellow. Badgering him until he agrees and then “submitting” to him is a farce. A wife is supposed to be a helper, but telling yourself you are helping your husband by helping him realize you’re right about everything is sin and a lie.

Sometimes even a good husband will be wrong. So what? Submit anyway, unless submission will be catastrophic. Maybe the kitchen should be green. Help him paint it yellow anyway, for the sake of the hierarchy, which is necessary and therefore more important than your kitchen.

It’s better to make trivial bad choices from time to time than it is to destroy the authority structure that keeps your family from destruction. As a mother, you will make mistakes all the time. Do you think your children are entitled to stop obeying you because of this? What will happen to them if they stop? Do you think they will have good lives?

As for men, maleness is not an achievement. You don’t get a prize for it. God doesn’t put you in charge so you can remain a selfish teenager all your life, staring at sports and playing video games, or obsessing on work, while you tell everyone else to kowtow and obey for your convenience. So you can be a frat boy when you’re 97.

A leader’s purpose is sacrificial, not selfish. Every real leader knows this. Strangely, Jews don’t know it. They worship a hard, imaginary God who doesn’t sacrifice himself for people or, in any real sense, regard them as his babies.

It makes perfect sense that God would allow himself to be crucified to save us, because even many earthly parents would do that for their children. A God who sits on a throne in the distance, invulnerable, ageless, and healthy, who never suffers for the ones he created, is not a leader. He’s more like someone who keeps tropical fish.

Every earthly parent understands the necessity of sacrifice as part of leadership, but somehow, Orthodox Jews think God’s principles of leadership are divorced from obvious principles we have seen here on Earth since man was created.

Yeshua, who was not captured, turned himself in to the Jewish authorities so he could be crucified, because he loved us so much he could not stand to see us get what we deserved. He endured rejection and slander. In his time here, he didn’t get much of a reward for all his efforts to help us. That’s how real leadership is. It’s asymmetrical in favor of those who are led.

This is what proper fatherhood is like. You may work all day. You pay the bills. You are the first one to face danger in a bad situation. In return, the people you help grumble. They say things about you that aren’t true. They disobey you and then blame you for the problems their disobedience causes. They make your job harder. They ostracize you to at least some extent. They never come close to repaying you. This is what God goes through, and if you’re a father on Earth, you’re supposed to go through it, too. It’s an honor and a privilege, even if it often feels like a curse.

I don’t know how anyone can respect a “god” who never suffers for the people he created. Earthly leaders suffer for the people they command, which is a good thing for them to do, but somehow God is not as good as they are? It’s absurd.

A proper patriarch does not expect his family to repay him fully. He expects to be shortchanged. He shouldn’t complain about his place, because it is more blessed to give than to receive. He shouldn’t sit around watching sports and playing video games all day, barking out selfish orders and leaving his family to guide themselves, as though a Y chromosome and a paycheck made him Queen for a Day.

A patriarch submits to God through the Holy Spirit. He does not grumble. He does not falsely accuse God of cheating him or not blessing him enough. He does not claim he submits when he only obeys the commands that comport with his own desires. He consistently asks God for correction when he has problems.

He doesn’t add up the ways in which his family has shortchanged him and present them with bills.

A patriarch spends time with his wife and children. He does not pat himself on the back for it, as though he gave a stranger a kidney. It’s what he owes them. He doesn’t say, “I’ve done this and that for my family, so now I’m free to do what I really want.” The time he spends with his family is not a tax or a permit fee. It’s a blessing for all concerned.

In order for a patriarch to succeed, the wife and kids have to support him instead of doing what they often do: joining outsiders in trying to bring him down. A leader has to have consent and support. Yeshua is the perfect leader, but humanity is still a failure, because most of us did not consent or support. A leader can’t force success on anyone.

I can give a great example of the way women kneecap their men. It amazes me that there are women who vote Democrat, knowing that their husbands vote Republican. This is the very picture of pathological rebellion. When two people vote the same way, they have power. When they vote contrarily, they have no power at all. It’s as though neither voted. Voting is an exercise of power, and casting opposing votes nullifies a household’s power. As Yeshua says, a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Opposition is supposed to be directed outward, not inward. Obvious? The world is against your husband. It’s sick and disgusting for you to be against him as well, especially when you still expect him to fight for you.

It’s pretty simple: one plus one equal two, which is something, and one minus one equals zero, which is nothing. When your votes agree, they have impact. When you vote against each other, you make your house a nothing.

Your husband considers the welfare of his family and his nation and decides to vote a certain way, and you decide you know better, destroying his power. Well, if you think your husband is too stupid to lead your family, what, exactly, did you want a husband for?

I know. Money, status, and babies. I don’t have to be told.

When I was a kid, I thought The Caine Mutiny was about a bad captain; nutty old Captain Queeg, and the smart officers who had to make a hard decision in order to save the crew from him. Of course, that’s not the message of the movie. It’s about immature, arrogant officers who destroyed their own leader instead of building him up. It’s a great picture of the way we destroy leaders who are put in place to benefit us.

The officers in the movie never tried to help Queeg do better. From the very start, they ridiculed him and worked against him. He was a flawed captain, but even a perfect captain would have failed with such officers. All fathers and husbands are flawed. What chance do we have without support? We can save ourselves, at best.

Queeg asked the officers for help, and in the book, he said this:

“Now, I’m the first to admit that I’m not perfect. I’ve made mistakes. I’ve had a lot on my mind. But a command is a lonely job. You men have no idea how lonely.

What I’m looking for is a little help. I don’t mean ‘Yes-man’ help. I mean the kind of loyalty that sees a captain through his mistakes for the sake of the ship. We’re all in this together. If we could just… well, start over. A clean slate. What do you say?”

Instead of helping, they refused to speak and waited for him to leave, rejected.

In the book, the snickering, whispering, mumbling coward who persuaded his friends to sabotage Queeg ended up captaining the ship, and he abandoned his crew in a battle, just as he abandoned his friends when they were charged with mutiny. The movie cheated the public.

All over the world, families are destroying the patriarchs who built the platforms they live on. No wonder young America men are shunning marriage now. In a world where young men are (correctly) moving to the right, and young women have swung hard left into sluttiness, rage, and arrogance, it is inevitable that men will avoid marriage. It’s like being asked to teach high school in the Bronx.

As for myself, I feel I need to give more time to God and my family and less to other things. Since my wife got pregnant, I have neglected things like shooting, tools, and yard maintenance. My pool is green. My hedges are a mess. I haven’t finished fixing the mower I bought last year.

I have felt I had to sink into the comfort of a love cocoon with God, my wife, and later, my son, to the detriment of my other responsibilities.

On the up side, I don’t regret it. I have had an experience very few fathers have had, and my wife is also privileged. These days many women treat their babies like purses or other accessories; like toys that bring them status. They hand them off to illegal aliens to raise while they give their golden, indescribably precious years of motherhood to jobs, serving alongside people who will forget them the week after they quit. My wife has been with her baby son every single day, as much as she wanted, and I have been with both of them.

On the down side, I know I still gave too much of myself to worthless things. The Internet. Even photography, which has been very useful in celebrating this family’s love. I haven’t given enough time to God and my wife and son, so I am turning the computer off multiple times every day instead of leaving it on, and I am trying to drop things that would ordinarily turn into time sinks.

If I give less time to worthless activities, I can give more to God and my family, and I can also do better with earthly responsibilities.

God is a patriarch. I am a patriarch. As a patriarch, I have power, but I also have responsibilities. My purpose is to pour myself out, not to be the king of the living room. This is all consistent with scripture and the Holy Spirit.

I’m very glad I’m not obsessed with video games or sports. These fixations are disgraceful; they keep men boys. Try and imagine yourself in heaven, with God asking you about your high video game scores or how much you could deadlift or how many games your teams won on Earth? Imagine the humiliation of even thinking about these things in his presence. But most American men think sports are more important than God, and many Christians even insist, childishly and in ignorance, that competitive sports teach Christian values. They teach the opposite. As for video games, it’s hard to imagine anything emptier.

There are many men out there who spend 10% of more of their income on watching sports yet don’t give yearly gifts to investment accounts for their kids. In fact, a man who does the opposite is an anomaly. A weirdo.

Sports insiders won’t say it, but the sports industry is, and always was, driven by gambling (another sin). Team valuations are largely based on gambling integration. Much of the money men spend on sports vanishes in lost bets. But it’s all about Christian values, supposedly.

A cheap (really bad) Super Bowl ticket costs $3500. To see a bunch of strangers who don’t know you exist do something unimportant and very silly. Think about that.

You can get your wife a dynamite gold chain for that amount. Or how about a weekend in Paris?

Feminism is a disgusting poison, and so is leftism. Spiritually, feminism is leftism. Satan was the first leftist. Leftism is about creatures coveting and wrongly taking that which belongs to those who are placed above them. It’s about taking shortcuts to get what you want.

A selfish patriarch is a rebel, too, so he is also a leftist. Leftists create leftist families with leftist problems.

I’m sorry for defaming God in my heart and exalting myself. I am trying to cooperate with the Holy Spirit to save whatever is left of my life and to be a blessing to my family. I don’t care what deluded, murderous people think of me, and I certainly don’t care about the arguments of loser spirits that want us to be losers just like them.

I’m All For the Ethical Treatment of Plants

My wife and I are both cutting way back on carbs, and it has paid off handsomely.

1. No more cravings or other types of appetite excess.

2. Less fat.

3. Gas reduction that should please any advocate of the Kyoto Protocols.

4. Stable moods.

5. Stable energy.

6. Less snoring.

7. No bloating or burping.

8. Easy meal preparation.

9. Fewer dishes to wash.

10. Lots of money saved because we almost never go to restaurants.

We also expect better dental health, because it is nearly impossible to get a cavity while on a diet that is close to or below the ketosis level.

I would call myself carnivore-adjacent these days. On Sundays, I have a slice of pizza and some other treats. The rest of the week, I barely touch carbs. Sometimes a small serving of raw berries. An occasional beer or shot of whiskey. That’s about it. My wife is nearly carnivore. No Sunday breaks, but she occasionally eat something that has a little oil that doesn’t come from animals.

She is down about 16 pounds. I’m down 18. I feel much better. Dumping carbs is worth it for that alone. I felt great before I made the change, but things have unquestionably improved. After that Sunday pizza slice, I definitely feel a little worse.

I’m trying to figure out whether we actually need plant-based foods. As with covid, the information is heavily censored and slanted, usually to the left, which is where the plants are. Leftists mistakenly think they are morally superior to Jews and Christians and our meat-eating God. They also think ending meat production will save the earth. They push hard against animal foods for reasons completely unrelated to health, and they promote lots of lies.

On the other hand, carnivores say some things that seem extreme. “All plants are trying to kill you.” And like vegan diets (although to a far lesser extent), carnivore diets may require supplementation or at least careful diet curation. Carnivores tend to be low on sodium, calcium, potassium, magnesium, iodine, and folate, and iodine and folate deficiencies cause birth defects.

Many plants really are trying to kill us. I had an epiphany about that.

A few years back, my friend Mike and I made a disastrous effort to grow plants in my yard. He tried to grow parsley. A few days ago, I saw something that looked like parsley in the grass, and I thought maybe parsley was growing in my yard because it had escaped from a pot.

I considered tasting one of the leaves to find out what I was looking at, but I decided not to. Why? If it wasn’t parsley, it could be dangerous.

As I thought about that, I suddenly realized this kind of caution only applied to plants. No one ever looks at an animal and thinks, “If I eat that, it could hurt me.” Please shut up with rare exceptions like vultures and polar bear livers. Quoting exceedingly rare exceptions to a generalization only bolsters the generalization.

My property is full of poisons. Tree leaves. Various weeds. Deadly mushrooms. On the other hand, it’s full of birds, mammals, reptiles, and bugs, just about all of which can be eaten safely.

I have grown tomatoes and peppers. Friendly, right? No, the green parts are poisonous. Potatoes? Same.

So yes, plants really are trying to kill us. Even plants we eat regularly. Soy. Cruciferous vegetables. Rhubarb leaves are dangerous. Undercooked kidney beans can cause terrible problems.

Just about none of the ornamental plants in my yard can be eaten safely.

I also learned that nutrients in plants are often not very bioavailable, whereas nutrients in meat go right into your system. The iron in spinach is an example. You don’t get much benefit from it, so when you check the grams-per-serving count, you can be badly deceived.

I saw Jordan Peterson, a man who eats only beef and salt, say something that appeared to be intended to debunk misguided vegetarian claims. One thing he said was very funny but intended to be antagonistic, so I will clean it up. He said the human digestive tract had more in common with that of a wolf than that of a chimp. He said that, because of their plant-heavy diet, chimps developed to have small brains and huge colons. Apparently, some vegetarians say apes prove we should stop eating meat.

This sounded like TikTok legend to me, so I looked it up. He is actually right. Like wolves, we have relatively small colons, and we produce a lot of stomach acid suitable for digesting meat.

He also pointed out that a cow, which lives on grass, has to have an enormous four-chambered stomach in order to make it work. Most people lack that, as far as I know.

Another interesting thing I learned: unless you jam your piehole full of high-carb items or soy, it’s hard to get a lot of nutrition from plants. For example, if you tried to survive on kale, you would have to eat over 9 pounds a day. If you only ate hamburger, you’re looking at a maximum of 1.7 pounds for 2200 calories.

I don’t know, but it sure looks like there is no hope unless you suck down a lot of oils, tubers, soy (an unnatural food which starts out toxic), sugars, and grain.

A vegan diet is much more of a science project than a low-carb diet.

Actually, that’s one of the best things about cutting down on carbs. You don’t stand around before meals trying to decide what to eat. Fry a burger and put cheese on it, or fix some bacon and several eggs. You’re done.

We are going to try to come up with a good plan for my wife’s next gestation. I have doubts about pure carnivore due to the folate and iodine issues, but it should be simple to come up with a good low-glycemic regimen that will be much better than the typical American shove-pretzels-and-ice-cream-into-mom routine that gave her diabetes the last time.

Making the Effortless Impossible

I’ve been having an interesting day with my Chinese Alibaba-grade excavator, an AGT QK16R.

The last time I used it, I saw a long trail of oil behind it, and I realized this was not right, even for a Chinese machine. I parked it and fiddled with it. I thought the oil was coming from the slew motor. This is the motor that turns the excavator without moving the tracks.

Slew motor leaks are common with these machines because a lot of Chinese workers don’t believe in using wrenches. My motor is held in by 4 M8 cap bolts with lock washers. A lot of people find that these bolts are loose from the factory. This makes the motors wobble around.

There are also 4 bolts on the underside of the motor itself, and they have been known to leave the factory loose. My understanding is that when these bolts are loose, the O-ring in the motor gets torn up and causes a leak.

I found out the size of the O-ring: 138. Don’t take my word for it, because I haven’t installed one yet. I got some O-rings.

Today I got into the excavator. It is an amazing piece of machinery. I don’t mean that in a good way.

To get to the slew motor, you have to take off the floor plate. Easy, right?

I removed every bolt that held the floor on, and of course, all sorts of stuff was still in the way. The pedestal with the controls, mainly.

I learned some things that may help others.

1. Do not try to take off the lower sheet metal. AGT puts welded nuts on the upper sheet metal, where you don’t really need them, and it uses loose nylocks for the lower sheet metal. They are very, very hard to get at for loosening and tightening. Welding nuts to the inside of the excavator would be a good mod.

2. Removing the upper sheet metal is not hard, but it is tedious. You have to take out 8 screws and nuts, plus two bolts, to remove the door in front of the engine. The 8 screws are in hinges which don’t work because AGT made it impossible for the door to swing. A clever guy tapped the pins out of his hinges and replaced them with R-clips. I plan to do that, although Velcro would probably work just as well.

3. You should remove the foot pedal in order to get the floor off. It is held on by one oddly-chosen screw with a nylock.

4. You will have to remove the lower canopy support which is bolted to the frame. The bolts that hold it on go through the floor for no good reason. I am going to turn the holes into slots so I can loosen the bolts and lift the floor up instead of removing the support. The support is not needed to hold the canopy up, because the canopy bars in the rear are mounted solidly to the excavator frame.

5. One guy recommends cutting off the bit of the floor to the right of the control pedestal. It doesn’t really need to be connected to the rest of the floor. It can be reinstalled after cutting it. Some minor mods could be added to make everything stiffer.

6. Another guy recommends cutting the floor in two big pieces, front and rear.

7. When you get the engine door off, you get access to the front oil dipstick. This machine has two dipstick holes, front and rear, and AGT puts the dipstick in the front one where you have to take the excavator apart to get at it. The holes are interchangeable, so while the door is off, swap the plug at the rear of the engine for the dipstick in front. Now you can check your oil.

It turned out my slew motor was just fine, sort of. The bolts were not very tight, but the motor was not loose. I pulled the bolts out, applied Loctite, and reinstalled them. I don’t know the actual torque figure, so I went with a Chinese measure: yu wei tai nau.

I am going to pull it and check the bolts on the underside. I don’t want to put the excavator together and then have the motor fail.

The hydraulic fluid was coming from a valve thing (hydraulic swivel joint?) that feeds the track motors. When I looked at it, without even checking, I thought it looked weird. One one side, there were three screw-on fittings, and one was clearly farther from the motor than the others, suggesting it wasn’t tightened all the way. I fired the machine up, moved the tracks, and saw oil dripping out of the fitting.

Now I have to tighten that fitting. I wondered how I would do it, because access is nearly nonexistent. It’s under another fitting which I can reach, but I can’t get to the leaky fitting itself. I realized I could remove the top fitting, tighten the leaky one, and reinstall the top one, so that’s what I’ll do.

I checked whatever I could reach to make sure nothing else would come undone, but I can’t get at everything without a ton of work, so I plan to put the excavator together and hope for the best. I’m glad nothing was damaged.

The moral here is: tighten everything you can on your Chinese excavator. Also, change the hydraulic fluid before you run it, and don’t be afraid to modify it. You really are smarter than the engineers who designed it.

This info ought to be very helpful to people with the exact same excavator, and it should be somewhat helpful to people with similar models.

Bad Ideas go to the Burn Pile

Oh, boy. I feel like a runaway slave.

I managed to bust out and get some things done. Jobs that have been weighing on me and making me feel trapped.

I have lost a bunch of oil seals lately. Utility cart rear axle. Excavator slew motor. Tractor front axle. Even my car is leaking around the oil sensor.

I finally took my tractor’s axle apart and replaced a seal and two bearings. I have been thirsting for the day when I could use the tractor again, and it has come.

I am moving more rocks out of my yard. I have some buried rocks and boulders that get in the way of the mower, and I also have–had–a big flowerbed surrounded by irregular native rocks placed there by the guy who built the house. In addition to all this, he and his wife dumped more native rocks in random places as decorations. He put a bunch of them in places where there should have been grass. I couldn’t mow over them, and they sheltered weeds.

Some people think there is nothing nicer than a bunch of crude rocks surrounding a flowerbed or a walk. I disagree. Pavers and curbs always, always look better. They do a better job of containing things. They make regular borders between things. It’s easy to get close to them while mowing without hitting them. It’s easy to clean them up with a weedeater.

An oval of irregular rocks in your yard says, “I am cheap and lacking in good taste and common sense.”

A natural rock formation can look nice, but decorating your yard with obvious landscaping debris is tacky and doesn’t fool anyone.

Putting these rocks around the flowerbed was extremely unwise. It looked bad, and it caused lots of problems. We have a neighbor who has flowerbeds with pavers, and his yard looks spectacular.

Today I put the bucket on the tractor and rammed it into the rocks surrounding the big flowerbed, dislodging them so I could move them. Some went right into the bucket. Most, I had to put there myself. There were a few big ones weighing up to, perhaps, 150 pounds. There were dozens of smaller ones ranging from maybe 100 pounds to the size of a golf ball.

The big ones, I rolled into the bucket. The smaller ones, I picked up and threw. In maybe 90 minutes, I must have moved over a ton. I wanted to do more, but it was getting dark.

I’m so grateful to God for my energy. I am too lazy to do serious exercise, but I had no problem yanking rocks out of the ground and getting them into the bucket. I worked fast. My heart rate was elevated. I was sweating. I didn’t die or anything. I felt great.

I have prayed for God to keep me going so I can be here on Earth for my wife and son. I got so used to envying Christians who died and left this place, I think I started to welcome death. I apologized to God and repented. I don’t like Earth, but I am eager to sacrifice in order to be with my loved ones and help them.

I won’t pretend my motivation is completely altruistic. I want to be with them. I would hate to find myself leaving them prematurely. I want to see him grow up, and I want him to know me.

I think God has graciously agreed to help me, in spite of my wickedness and selfishness.

I told my wife to keep my son away from me for a couple of minutes so I could drink something and get it together, but he just ran in, stood up beside my chair, and started clawing at my shirt while screaming with joy. Then he speed-crawled away. Now he’s back.

He seems to have the same kind of energy I have. God’s joy, I believe.

She came and got him. I have to get up and join him in playing with his toys in a minute.

I’m sure there are still rocks out there. I’ll have to take a pitchfork and sift through the dirt to get rid of the ones I missed. After that, I’ll be able to mow over the flowerbed every week to kill weeds and puree the dead leaves.

I have hit rocks by the flowerbed with mowers several times. The rock border was formed so irregularly, I could not guess where it ended.

My theory is that the original owner and his wife told their kids, “Take the rocks we’ve found in the yard and pile them up around those two oaks by the driveway! It will be a fun project!” Then the kids moved a couple of huge rocks there, realized they wanted to be doing something else, and started using smaller and smaller rocks and arranging them with a sloppiness that increased with time.

Then the wife planted a magnolia between the oaks, which were about 7 feet apart, leaving me no choice but to rip it out after I moved here.

My wife and I have decided to make this place our own and abandon all reverence for the original owners’ ideas. I used to give them deference, thinking they had to know things I didn’t know, but over time, I have realized they made lots of dumb decisions I need to undo.

I plan to leave the flowerbed alone so grass covers it. It’s in the shade, in a place where oak leaves fall and kill things. It would take a ton of work to keep it up and make anything grow.

They also left a huge, sick oak in the middle of the driveway island. I had to cut that and get rid of it after it snapped 30 feet up. Next to it, there was a dense shrub about three feet high, encircling a scraggly dwarf magnolia that looked like it had tuberculosis. You don’t plant a tree inside a shrub. Is this not obvious?

A few weeks back, I tore out the shrub and the magnolia. Of course, there were also two ugly rocks, which I removed. I am thinking of making a proper flowerbed there with pavers around it. I’ll fill it with mulch and put some kind of attractive low-maintenance tree in the middle. Maybe a peach tree or a crape myrtle. Around here, the crape myrtle is the go-to answer to poor soil and hostile bugs and weeds. It’s not the greatest tree, but it thrives, and it doesn’t need much care.

No one should ever buy a dwarf magnolia. They always look like the tree Charlie Brown brought to school for the Christmas play.

I also had a magnolia about 15 inches from my expensive brick front walk. That was not a smart choice. You never put a tree close to a house unless you like buying new roofs, siding, pavement, and ceilings.

I murdered that magnolia, too, and I’m also going to murder the two rows of boxwoods that line the walk. Boxwoods always look like they’re dying, and you shouldn’t use shrubs to wall a walk in and get in the way.

I have other boxwoods, and they will die soon. I also killed some kind of scraggly tree beside the workshop. It got in the way when I mowed, and it looked awful.

I bought a flail mower, and I finally assembled it. I have a couple of things left to do to make it work better. Then the boxwoods will meet its spinning blades and become sawdust.

This property will never make Architectural Digest, but I should be able to make it presentable and arrange things so taking care of it doesn’t break my back.

I killed the original owner’s wife’s roses a long time ago. Roses always look terrible unless they receive perfect care and pruning, and they were in a bad location. I’ve killed many of her plants.

She put hideous, enormous bromeliads near the front door. I paid a friends’ kids to do some weeding, and they tore them out because they didn’t know what they were doing. That’s fine by me, because I think bromeliads look sort of evil.

I had a very satisfying time with the tractor. I can’t wait to see this place looking better.

My Rebuttal to Dale Carnegie

I had the funniest dream last night.

I use a lot of Internet forums because I have a lot of interests. I can’t just conjure up friends and relatives who can tell me how to wire up a guitar amp tube socket or change an oil seal on a tractor axle. I have to look elsewhere.

Something about me attracts insults and abuse. Internet forums are full of jerks. Anyone who participates in a typical forum will eventually be bullied and provoked. My strategy is to try to show humility and patience from the start, and I use self-deprecating remarks to keep the jerks from waking up, but to many jerks, humility and self-deprecation are like the smell of poop to flies, so they pounce.

Eventually, if someone will not leave me alone, I will respond in kind. I am much better at this than most people, and forum moderators don’t like it. You can let a complete ass insult you over and over for weeks, and you can count on forum moderators to leave him alone, but when you get fed up and snap back with a penetrating shot from a larger caliber, you get in trouble.

These days, more and more moderators are ignorant young wokesters, so things are worse if there is any kind of conservative or Christian smell to you. It doesn’t have to be overt; a slight hint will serve just fine to get you disparate and unfair treatment.

Some old crank has been needling me on a forum for saying it’s a good thing to expose people who give consumers a raw deal. It’s like he’s a dog and the neighbor’s shar pei is in heat. He can’t move on. I responded to his obnoxious remarks civilly several times, and he can’t shut up.

I quit going to the forum, but after a week or two, I decided to visit again, and he was still at it. I told him the first of the month was coming up, so I was glad I wasn’t paying rent on his head.

Personally, I would rent a house, not an efficiency, but let’s move on.

Now some woke kid moderators are sending me email messages. I responded once, and now I just put them in the Archived folder. Maybe I’ll read them in a month or two, or maybe I’ll use other forums.

There are some seriously non-woke forums out there, so that’s nice. One example is Arborist Site, for people who need help with forestry tools. Gun forums are also pretty good. I wouldn’t go near a Christian forum, because I can’t handle the self-righteousness from people who do nothing but quote fools like Joel Osteen and T.D. Jakes. Few things are worse than being scolded by ignorant, disrespectful people.

Some people are drawn to Christianity by a desire to change and get close to God. Many more, however, are drawn by the desire to be God’s Karens and HOA presidents. Yeshua was murdered by self-promoting, self-adoring Karens.

A Youtube preacher named Tom Fischer lectured me for criticizing TV preachers and their prosperity nonsense. Well, he lives in a camper that was a gift. I am not making fun of him. Poverty is no joke. But he lives in a camper, he has had this standard of living for many years, and he essentially called me an enemy of Christ for criticizing the prosperity gospel.

He told me I had discipline coming. I was living in a nice house. I had a wonderful wife. I didn’t have to work. I lived in a fantastic area with warm, kind people. Since he gave me his warning, I have had a magnificent baby son who brightens every day of my life. Things get better all the time.

As I have told my wife, if this is discipline, I want more of it.

He has a lot of company. A lot of people have told me God was either getting me or going to get me. Most ironically, Alberto Lee Santiago, the child-rapist pastor from my last church. He told me God didn’t like what I was doing. Within a couple of years, he was put in prison, his wife (who agreed with him) died from a brain tumor before he was sentenced, and of course, he lost his church.

His brother-in-law Sander was also enraged at me, although of course, he claimed he was praying for me. Sometimes I think that’s the ultimate Christian diss.

Sander was an illegal alien; maybe he still is. He got furious at me for calling Osteen a grinning jackass, which I stand by. He got even madder when I said illegal immigration was a Biblical curse, which is a hundred percent true. When Santiago was arrested (after doing his level best to discourage the victim’s mother from forgiving him), Sander posted a meme criticizing church members for abandoning their “shepherd.”

There are a lot of things a good shepherd does with sheep. What Albert did is not one of them.

I would like to see Tom Fischer and his wife in a big, beautiful house with a pack of cute kids playing around their feet, but it looks like the prosperity gospel is keeping him where he is. It was designed by Satan to do that. It works beautifully. As Satan’s tools go, it is unsurpassed in its effectiveness.

The more you give to prosperity preachers, the less you prosper, and the less you can give to the poor. That’s the scheme, in a nutshell. In a way, it’s almost beautiful. So simple and powerful.

Fischer also lays into the Jews all the time, which is beyond disappointing.

Anyway, that’s just an example of what happens when I speak up around Christians. Religious people murdered Yeshua, and they want to get rid of everyone else who shoots down their idols and superstitions. Jewish or Christian, it’s the same kind of people.

I really hope no one hits me with “Judge not” for the rest of this year. I don’t know if I’ll be able to restrain myself. I’m going to get a shirt that says, “‘Judge not’ is not the only verse in the Bible.”

Like Yeshua and the apostles, I judge people all the time. It’s extremely helpful to me and whoever hears it. I don’t care who the person is; the other day I judged Billy Graham for saying Muhammad Ali was a follower of Jesus Christ. That was a stupid and dangerous thing to say. I don’t care how many people went to Graham’s crusades.

Billy Graham is probably close to the top of the Christian idol totem pole. He was so relentlessly inoffensive, he drew the admiration of hundreds of millions. What did Yeshua, an unpopular person, say about popularity?

If I’m willing to knock Billy Graham, you know I’m hard core.

My wife saw Graham say this, and she was mortified. We listened to him, and the impression we got was that he denied the necessity of the cross, which could mean he was not saved. Denying Yeshua is the absolute surest and quickest way to lose your salvation.

Muhammad Ali, a Muslim, named himself after a pedophile rapist gangster who was physically dirty and encouraged his followers to perform acts of terrorism against non-Muslims. Ali was no follower of Yeshua. He was an extremely ignorant man, he lived a life of defeat, and he is almost certainly in hell. Graham saw no point in correcting him. In fact, he reinforced his eternal itinerary by lying to his face. Great job, Billy.

Believe it or not, warning people about hell is important. Is it controversial to say that? Can that possibly be? Slap yourself hard in the face and think about it.

To get back to my dream, I dreamed someone emailed me a link to a new forum, and I visited it. All of the posts were reposts of things I had written on forums. All the horrible non-woke things that had sent snowflakes running for their weed stashes and power crystals.

One of the posts was very funny. The guy who created the forum was furious at me for using the phrase “crazy people.” You can’t say “crazy” any more, even if you’re describing a bona fide psychotic who has to be kept strapped to a wall.

This useful, accurate phrase is considered offensive. That’s just crazy.

God has blessed me for giving up secular entertainment. I did it earlier this year, and although my life was very good beforehand, it is much, much better now. Years ago, he blessed me for giving up social media. Now I wonder if he wants me to quit using Internet forums.

I feel like I need them for the purpose of getting information, but that may be an excuse. I also use them for socializing.

Now that AI is freely available, I have found that it’s a better source of help than Internet forums. Forum people like answering questions about which they know nothing. They also drag threads off topic. Maybe I should drop forums and stick with AI as much as I can.

Participation in the world’s culture is unequal yoking, so it has to be minimized.

Is using AI unequal yoking? I hope not. It’s pretty woke, i.e. deluded. AI bots aren’t people, though, so I treat them like the inanimate objects they are. I don’t try to get along with them. I don’t use good manners. I never joke with them. It would be like trying to befriend a shovel.

The world’s culture is a minefield. It was designed by Satan. He puts little temptation mines in TV, fiction, movies, sports, music, and the news. When you walk through it, the mines blow up under your feet. Demons get permission to enter your home and go after you and your family.

The most pleasant thing about abandoning secular entertainment is that it put an end to my lust issues. I didn’t realize it, but websites that don’t seem sex-related have little bits of erotic content in them designed to pull you further astray, and it works. News sites are full of erotic clickbait about whorish female celebrities. This one or that one shocked the crowd at Sundance by going to a viewing naked! This one has an incredible “bikini bod” at 57! That one wore a CHEEKY dress to the Golden Globes! It’s all over sites like The Daily Mail and Yahoo News.

I don’t need to see professional sluts all day. Sorry; that’s what they are. I wouldn’t let them be part of my social circle or walk onto my property, so why read about them on the Internet?

I didn’t realize reading the news or watching shows like Clarkson’s Farm could lead to problems with lust, but it does. It must lead to other demonic issues, too.

Being delivered from demons is wonderful, but it’s a second-rate blessing. The better blessing is to avoid having demons in the first place. Secular culture brings them in, and if they are cast out and you go back to secular culture, they enter you all over again.

I would rather stay free than watch Fox News. The Catholic news channel.

Any channel where more than one host refers to an old celibate socialist elected by gays as the holy father is suspect.

I’m not going to fit in with this world. If I started to, it would be a sign that I had backslidden and lost my relationship with God. Changing my behavior to avoid offending won’t help. The real offense is my existence. I’m like a Jew. The problem people have with me isn’t my behavior. It’s my existence itself.

Currying favor won’t make anyone like me. It will just strip me of the favor of God and grieve the Holy Spirit.

If I try to make people like me by being less honest, they will still hate me, but I will lose my relationship with God.

Go ahead and dislike me. They will never build a microscope powerful enough to detect my respect for your opinion of me.

That’s a Wrap

It’s amazing how long it can take to do a simple job.

I bought a used Kubota ZD326 mower. I decided to adjust the rear anti-scalp wheels. This should take under two minutes. I am now weeks into it. They were seized to the deck by rust, due to Kubota’s stupid design. I had to drill one out, and I cut the other one off, along with its support, pushed it out with a hydraulic press, and welded the support back on the mower.

I also needed to replace a fender. Kubota’s plastic fenders break easily. My understanding is that they get brittle from sunlight, and the design is not strong to begin with. I applied a little pressure to a fender in order to make room so I could remove a fuel tank, and the fender split. Figuring I might as well have matching fenders, I ordered a fender for each side.

They arrived covered in bubble wrap. That seemed like a good idea, but when I tried to unwrap them, I learned that Kubota uses bubble wrap with glue on the back. This probably saves an enormous company a thousand dollars a decade in wages for cutting and applying two pieces of tape per fender.

The glue on my fenders was very strong. I had to pull very hard to get the bubble wrap loose. It took a long time because I was afraid I would break another fender if I wasn’t careful.

Great. Job finished. Right?

No.

The bubble wrap came off, but it left big spots of glue on the fenders.

I have a lot of respect for Kubota (still), so I thought maybe they used some new kind of glue that dissolved in water. I thought they might be that smart. I also thought no company could be stupid enough to ship a large, delicate product covered with glue that was hard to remove.

I tried a wet paper towel, and nothing happened.

In my experience, I have generally run into two kinds of glue. The water-soluble type, like the glue on the backs of stamps, and the kind that won’t come off without a solvent. When water didn’t work on my fenders, I started going through the solvent roster.

1. Alcohol. Worked very slowly, smearing the glue around over larger areas.

2. Goo-gone. About like alcohol. I didn’t try WD-40 or mineral spirits because they’re pretty similar to Goo-gone.

3. Acetone. Ate the plastic.

4. Lighter fluid. Better than 1,2, and 3, but not good.

5. Turpentine. This turned out to be the winner. It cut the glue quickly. I used it to clean both fenders, and then I cleaned them again, because when I did it the first time, the turpentine diluted the glue without getting all of it off. When I wiped a fender with turpentine, it cut the glue, but then the turpentine on the paper towel had glue in it, so you can see how that works.

Later on, a guy who works on Kubotas told me he used mild soap and water to take the bubble wrap off, and he says the whole process only takes him a few minutes. He claimed removing the bubble wrap was easy. Specifically, he mentioned fenders for a later model.

I don’t know what to say about that. Water was useless for me, so I had no reason to think soap and water would work. I would have used it if I had thought there was a chance, but I have removed all sorts of adhesive residue over the years, and not once have I seen a glue that dissolved well with soap and water yet resisted plain water.

As for removing the bubble wrap easily, my theory is that my fenders were hard to unwrap because the bubble wrap was old. My mower came out in 2007. The fenders I bought may have been sitting in hot warehouses for 15 years or more. A glue containing water would surely get thicker and harder over a period of years.

Before I used turpentine to finish the job, I used AI. I made it search the web, and when it failed, I made it do it over. It came up with stupid answers like vinegar. For some reason, everyone now thinks vinegar is a panacaea. It is recommended often for jobs it simply will not do. Maybe this has to do with the woke bias against chemicals that work. Better to waste your day trying to strip paint or kill roaches with vinegar than to use something Mother Gaia doesn’t like.

People also recommend Simple Green for a lot of jobs it won’t really do. I bought a gallon of it, and I found it nearly useless. The company has been sued by people claiming it’s not really good for the environment or human beings, and that’s pretty funny.

AI couldn’t find the correct answer, so you have to wonder how Kubota expected me to know it off the top of my head.

I still have the bubble wrap, and I am tempted to try removing the glue from a piece with soapy water.

I just tried it, and it seems to work. The soap makes a big difference.

By the time I was done with the bubble wrap, I had no appetite left for installing the fenders, so my wife and I went out to dinner.

At this point, I honestly wish I had bought a new $18,000 mower. My grass is a foot tall, and I still have at least 4 hours of unpleasant work in front of me, not including the time it takes primer and paint to dry, before I can mow.

After 18 years of collecting and using tools, I honestly thought I was capable of removing bubble wrap, but Kubota proved me wrong.

I find it remarkable that there is no readily-available information about this on the web. I searched. I made AI search. I made AI redo the search. It’s like no one has ever heard of sticky bubble wrap.

Now that I’ve written about it here, other people will be able to find the answer quickly.

I just wish a few other people had written about it before I did.

I Will Rule This Thing

Yesterday I moved one big step closer to having a working lawnmower.

The gauge wheel pins on my used Kubota ZD326 mower seized with light rust because Kubota made them too tight in their bare-steel bores. In a tight bore, even a tiny amount of rust will exert enormous internal pressure, to the point where a hydraulic press is required to fix it. This happened to me, or rather, it happened to the mower’s original owner, and I was stuck with the problem of fixing it.

The deck has two rear wheels, and they do not turn. The pins don’t move in the supports except when they are moved to adjust the height, and in a flat state like Florida, that may never happen. If they are moved often enough, presumably, the rust problem will be mitigated well enough to prevent seizing, but how often is often enough?

Kubota’s manual calls for zero maintenance of any kind on these pins, so you can do everything the manual says and still have the problem. It has also vexed many tractor owners, because some tractor decks have the same pins.

It’s a stupid and inexcusable bit of failed engineering, and 18 years after the mower was introduced, Kubota still hasn’t addressed it. The parts they sell for the affected decks have not changed, except that the plating on the pins is now inferior. They changed the assembly when they designed the next model, and they were definitely aware of it, because how could they not be?

I drilled one pin out, and it was a nightmare, so when I got to the other one, I cut its support off and put the whole thing in the hydraulic press.

Yesterday, I welded it back on the deck.

Welding was not fun.

One of the cardinal rules of welding is that you make yourself comfortable when you do it. If not, your hand may shake, you may have to change positions, and so on. You need to start with a comfortable positiong with good access and visibility.

In order to remove my deck, I have to turn the rear pins 90°. You can see the problem. The pins were locked. I couldn’t get the deck out without extraordinary exertions. Because the deck was on the mower, I couldn’t see well, access was poor, and I had to bend over in an uncomfortable position.

I got it done, sort of. I needed to replace 4 welds. I replaced three. The other one is under the mower, and I don’t want to flail at it blindly. What I have now is strong enough to allow me to remove the deck, improve the welds, and do the painting.

Not the prettiest welds on Earth, but in all likelihood, if I did nothing more, the mower would work just fine with three ugly beads until I died.

Look at that shoddy chrome. Nice work, Kubota.

I am trying to figure out how to prevent future seizures from happening. There are a few solutions.

1. Move the pins every single time I mow and several times during the season. The bore will never stop rusting, so the seizing process will start anew every time I get off the mower and move the pins. I don’t know how long it takes for the pins to seize, so moving them every week seems to be the only safe course. During the off season, I can take them out.

2. Slather the pins with anti-seize.

3. Reduce the diameter of the pins.

Moving the pins is not the answer. I’ll forget, for one thing. Even if I don’t, I may misjudge the necessary interval. Also, it’s a kludge, not a workmanlike solution.

Anti-seize is not the answer. Anti-seize is one of the messiest substances known to man. For some reason, it gets on everything. Worse than grease. I don’t want it all over me and my clothes every time I fool with the pins. It will also trap grit in the bores.

Now that I think about it, I have no reason to expect anti-seize to prevent corrosion. That isn’t exactly what it’s made for. Corrosion is what makes the rust form, and rust locks up the assemblies.

Trimming the pins is the way to go. On the lathe, it’s a sub-one-hour job. I happen to have a lot of copper sulfate, so I can plate the pins so the areas where I cut the chrome off will have some rust protection for cosmetic purposes. Later on, I can look into getting some zinc compound or other to put zinc on the pins.

Now I am looking for information on machining chromed parts. Chromium seems to be right up there with plutonium on the hazard scale. It causes cancer and other things. Chrome plating is very hard, too. So I need to cut through hard plating, or remove it and then cut the steel under it, without poisoning myself.

Removing it with acid would release gas and put chromium compounds into a solution I would have to dispose of, and grinding it off would create a breathable dust.

I think the best thing is to just throw it on the lathe and see what carbide does. The lathe will produce chips too big to inhale. One hopes.

Before I can use the mower or remove the deck, I have to replace the plastic fenders. They are brittle from exposure, and I broke one by applying slight pressure in just the wrong way. The fenders attach to the mower with screws, and the screws go into nylon inserts that push into square holes in the fenders. Incredibly, Kubota sells the fenders without the inserts.

Removing the old inserts from the original inserts is an interesting process. They have little projections that extend outward to anchor them behind the plastic. I got two out using a screwdriver to push the inserts in, and then I realized I could just put the fender fragments in a vise and crush the parts that held the inserts. The plastic explodes, and the inserts fall on the floor.

Some day, I will mow again. And I will know more about this mower than the people who built it. Except for little things like the engine and transmission. But who cares about those, right?

Sometimes it’s not You

I am celebrating because I finally got the right-hand rear anti-scalp wheel shaft out of my Kubota mower deck.

What a nightmare this has been.

The old guy who first owned the mower failed to grease the front deck wheels, so the guy who sold it to me had to struggle to get rusted parts out of the tubes that supported them. That was consumer error. He also failed to remove the rear shafts regularly and apply anti-seize, which was not something Kubota mentioned in the manual, and which was only necessary because Kubota’s engineers created a laughably bad design. That was not the owner’s fault.

The front wheels turn, and their supports have zerks and grease journals. Greasing and reasonably frequent mowing might have prevented them from seizing. The rear wheels do not turn. They sit for years or months in the same position. There are no zerks. There are no journals. If you never have to adjust your mower’s height, and you have this mower, you could end up with stuck shafts.

The rear shafts are just about exactly the same diameter as the interiors of the bores they occupy. This is called a slip fit or transitional fit, depending on how tight the bores originally were. A slip fit, also called a clearance fit, involves a shaft small enough to go in a hole very easily. A transitional fit is very precise but not so tight it requires pressure to assemble the parts. A bore can be pretty snug without becoming a transitional fit. I think. Let me repeat: I took a wrong turn and got a physics degree instead of an engineering degree.

I believe the difference between the OD and ID I’m dealing with is under 0.005″, or 1/200 of the shaft’s diameter.

The shafts are carbon steel plated with what appears to be cadmium. Cadmium was commonly used in years past to prevent rust. The interiors of the bores are plain old steel. You can see the problem here. The cadmium should slow (not prevent) shaft corrosion, but it does nothing to prevent the bores from rusting. It’s also fragile, so it wears off. Then you have steel on steel.

Can you tell I’ve done a lot of research?

If even one part in the assembly is bare steel, the engineering is stupid and doomed to fail in any environment where there are temperature swings and condensation.

The reason my shafts sealed is that water condensed on their upper ends and then seeped down between the shafts and bores. This wet the bores and caused rust. Rust takes up more room than the steel it replaces. In a tight bore, this means you get pressure. You get a rusty shaft and a rusty bore pressing against each other, because there is no room for the rust to expand.

The pressure can become immense. In my case, heat didn’t work, and neither did a sledge or a three-foot pipe wrench.

Often, shafts are pressed into tight bores without adhesives or threads. It is common to press a shaft into a bore with an inner diameter smaller than the shaft’s diameter. This is called an interference fit. Rust can turn a slip or transitional fit into an interference fit.

A deliberate interference fit is not usually a problem to work with. Engineers usually design them so pins or shafts can be hammered or pressed out without trouble. Kubota’s accidental interference fit is different. It is way tighter, because it’s the result of an engineer’s failure to plan, not his careful and competent planning.

I really struggled to remove my left shaft. I knew I could take the support and tube off the mower and use the hydraulic press, but I tried to avoid it. I thought it wouldn’t be all that hard with the support still on the mower. Boy, was I wrong. It took hours and hours of miserable work.

As for the left shaft, I got smart. I cut the support off the tractor today, and I put it on the old hydraulic press.

The support is a piece of folded sheet metal welded to the tube the shaft goes through. To use the press, I needed something to support the tube, and it had to fit with the folded metal in place. I resigned myself to making something from metal stock I had lying around. I was going to fire up the mill and/or lathe. Instead, I decided to set the support on an impact socket with the shaft inside the hex end.

This worked perfectly, except for the fact that the ratchet end of the socket was obstructed. If I had used a simple tube, I would have been able to push the shaft all the way through in one shot. As it was, I had to flip the support maybe 20 times.

Talk about seized. The first time the shaft moved, it went about 3/32″ and then acted like it wanted to stop. Not wanting to damage the socket, I started the flipping process. I applied penetrating oil. I cleaned the shaft off between flips. It really did not want to come out.

I don’t think a 12-ton press would have done the job. A sledge didn’t, and my 3-ton arbor press didn’t do a thing.

Eventually, the shaft moved a lot farther, and it loosened up to where the arbor press would push it. I moved to the arbor press, which is easier to use. After a few more flips, I put the support on a vise and used a hammer and punch. Before long, the shaft fell out.

I used a belt grinder and wire wheel to clean the shaft up, and I used sandpaper inside the support’s tube. Then I tried to put the shaft back in. There was still friction. That’s how bad Kubota’s design is.

My John Deere 430 has similar shafts that are very loose. They can’t seize. Because they’re loose, water runs out of the tubes, and they dry instead of accumulating rust. Because of the gaps, the rust would have to be unrealistically thick to make anything seize. Because the shafts rattle a little, the rust can’t grow. I don’t like the 430, but JD’s anti-scalp strategy is completely superior, and they were using it at least as far back as 1984.

Kubota was watching them. That’s what companies do to their competitors. They still didn’t fix their own design.

Here’s a photo of John Deere’s utterly superior and obvious design:

This may be the only time John Deere did something as well or better than Kubota.

The only real difference is the clearance, which Kubota could not figure out.

It just occurred to me that there may have been a patent problem. That is easier to believe than the alternative, which is that real engineers thought tight-fitting shafts were a good move.

I don’t see how you could patent not making wheel support shafts too tight. Surely that was figured out in the 1700’s. The web says there were working metal lathes in the first quarter of the 18th century, so it was possible to size holes and shafts accurately back then. People would have noticed that tight bores caused problems, because people are smarter than monkeys.

I keep going on about how Kubota blew it because when I’ve looked for help on the web, people have gotten really angry at me for saying engineers made a mistake. Engineers, in particular, have gotten mad and said crazy, emotional things.

They are STEM people, and a lot of STEM people 1) don’t really grow up, and 2) lack a sense of humor.

When I was a physics teaching assistant, I was hit in the face with the reality of the STEM personality. It wasn’t much of an issue when I was an undergrad, because I knew people in Miami outside of physics, but as a grad student, STEM people were just about all I had.

All my life, I have made friends quickly, but in a year and a half in a physics department, the only friend I made was my girlfriend. Absolutely NO ONE cared when I left. No one ever visited my apartment. I never saw the inside of any of their apartments. Weird.

I saw the inside of the house where one of my students lived, so maybe that shows they were more normal than my peers.

I migrated to law school, and once there, I was the life of the party. Never lacked for company. Saw other people’s homes. Woke up on another student’s floor because I was so drunk I couldn’t drive home, and I didn’t even know her well. Took people fishing many times. Joined organizations.

I made friends at both of my last churches. I have godchildren. My friends still come to visit, and I left my last church in 2015.

I have probably written about one of my favorite TA’s. His name was Ian. His students called him “Fridge.” He had no facial expressions. He wore exactly what you would expect: non-denim pants and a plaid short-sleeve button-down shirt. Chuck Taylors.

Fridge told me he had no furniture in his apartment. I asked him where he did his homework. He said he held a clipboard and leaned against a wall.

Fridge was very droll, but you wouldn’t want to be his friend.

Then there was Todd. He liked Asian women. A lot. He told me, “It’s not a fetish. It’s a PREFERENCE.” The big smile on his face as he said “preference” was not wholesome. He said it in kind of a breathy way.

He said he was going to move to Japan to teach English. He told me other things I didn’t want to know.

Then there was an obese guy named Rich. The king of the TA office. He tormented other people for no reason. He was obnoxious to me. I think he may have thought this was the way to make friends, like a boy who can’t make himself say he has a crush. He had been in the department for a while, and I never saw any indication that he was friends with anyone.

Come to think of it, I can’t recall ever seeing anyone in that office who was there for social reasons, except for my girlfriend. One TA was married, and I think his wife may have made an appearance. Or maybe he just mentioned her.

Rich had a locking bookshelf, and he kept stealing my head TA’s expensive books and putting them in it. Like he was pulling his pigtails, I guess.

I wasn’t the problem back at the physics department, believe me.

I think the University of Texas (my school) did a horrible job of cultivating new physicists. It seems like most of the people I knew ended up doing other things.

My head TA, Bill, whose idea of useful activity was going on Usenet and telling people they should have read the FAQ before posting, ended up working at a civil engineering firm with no Ph.D., after working hard as a postdoc on accretion disk theory. Another guy left to create video games while I was there. The guy who shared my TA office desk got a Ph.D. in EE in 1999, which is what I should have done. It looks like Fridge teaches physics to high school students, but I’m not sure it’s him.

Rich was considered extraordinarily able, but the web says he is “self-employed” now.

UT really tortured the physics students, undergrad and graduate. The professors were so bad, they generally couldn’t teach poop to stink. They did stupid things like giving the undergrad students lab experiments about topics they hadn’t covered yet. I could not believe it when my lab students told me. I had to do Professor Frommhold’s work for him, in a few minutes here and there.

I’ve written about the quantum professor who gave my class a homework problem he couldn’t solve. Also, UT used an E&M textbook that was famous for making students want to kill themselves. It’s not like there weren’t better books. Jackson’s E&M was more like a hazing tool than a teaching tool. “We suffered with it, so you will, too.”

Jackson didn’t actually explain anything, so he didn’t perform the only essential function of a teacher. He was an idiot. He didn’t teach, and then he followed up with extremely hard problems.

Everyone in my TA office had the ability to get a Ph.D. in physics, including me. I was not the dunce in the room. The guy who seemed slowest is now an experimental physicist. But UT’s way of caring for students was like Roundup’s way of caring for weeds. It was like we had sprung up uninvited, and they needed to get rid of us. Unbelievably stupid.

It’s odd how really smart STEM types are known for doing some things that are brilliant and other things that are incredibly dumb, habitually.

Why would you invest time and other resources on collecting students, find most of them abandoned the entire field because of you, and then continue doing things the same way?

It is possible to teach students physics without abusing them, regardless of what bitter old academics may say. The end product would be a lot more working physicists. I understand the importance of weeding out the weak, but UT also weeded out the strong.

Part of it comes back to the “smartest boy in class” syndrome. Many physics people have had proud moms who showed them off all the time and talked about how smart they were. This makes them crave attention for their intelligence, which partly explains why so many of them get bullied. It makes them annoying. The physical bullying is sometimes revenge for intellectual bullying.

If you can drive off a bunch of students by teaching poorly and making them suffer unduly, you can then go sit with your colleagues and talk about how much smarter you are than the students who left. But it’s not true. Brilliant people leave physics every day. A lot of them do it to preserve their sanity.

Man, I should have been an engineer. It’s much easier. It’s practical. It leads to better jobs. The potential for high income is much greater. The people may be weird, but I don’t think anyone is weirder than physicists. Even mathematicians seem more human.

It’s funny, because my professors at the University of Miami were generally great, except for one ancient, smirking bully named Harry Robertson. The statistical physics guru. He was so sadistic and ineffective, he caused a riot once. Undergrads threw together a furious protest because he failed a huge percentage of them, and I know for a fact that he could not teach. This was before protesting was considered acceptable.

There was no humanity in this man at all. Other people’s feelings and futures meant absolutely nothing to him. He taught my advanced mechanics class, and a bunch of us failed the first exam. We met with him. He showed up in bedroom slippers, he smirked a lot, looked down at his desk, showed us a rattleback toy without explaining it in order to make himself look smart and us stupid, dismissed our concerns as though we were claiming we needed masseurs in class, and left.

To excuse his behavior, he pointed to the one student in the class who was doing well. A Chicom. Thing is, that guy probably had tons of support from China and other Chicom students.

If you think about it, it’s amazing that a statistics expert could claim a large group of students could slip by other instructors for years and then suddenly be exposed as morons by one professor. And that he could claim it had happened more than once. The undergrads he tormented would have numbered in three figures. So suddenly, UM admitted a hundred or more imbeciles, but it hadn’t happened the previous year, and it didn’t happen the next year. Okay, Harry.

Apart from Harry, who intentionally made things very hard for students and then blamed them, my profs at UM were exemplary instructors. I loved their classes. Same for my math and comp. sci. profs. For that matter, I had good instructors in the philosophy and literature courses I was forced to take. My UM instructors were generally much more effective than the instructors I had at Columbia University, now that I think about it.

Physics and math are beautiful and very enjoyable, they can be taught clearly and painlessly, and they deserve good instructors. Not guys who are still trying to get even with young people for being cruel to them in high school.

As for the mower, now I have to clean the parts up, removing burrs and oils, not to mention paint that could get in the way, and I have to weld the support back on the mower. Should be a one-hour job. Then I will apply primer and paint to the affected areas. After that, I should be able to put all my new parts on the mower and forget this problem ever happened.

I did not want to cut the deck up. It somehow seemed risky and almost presumptuous, although it was neither. The support is just a piece of sheet steel, like any other. It’s not like I’m cutting the fender off a Bentley.

There is a Youtube guy named Jimmy Diresta, and he makes all kinds of things. He welded some casters on a project. Usually, you use screws and nuts to attach casters. Using a welder seemed bold. He said, “I am the god of this thing.” He meant that if his welds turned out to be problematic, it didn’t matter, because he could do whatever was needed to fix it.

I would not call myself the god of anything, but I always think of him when I make what seems to be a bold use of tools. I can change it, so who cares? I have welded casters on a bunch of things, and I learned he had the right idea. Welding is better.

When you use screws, if you’re any kind of craftsman, you spend a lot of time locating the holes correctly. You use a punch to make dimples for the drill. Then you have to screw the casters on, using 8 washers, 4 screws, and 4 nuts per caster. With the welder, you just slap magnets down to hold the casters and let her rip. Then you get a cleaner project with casters that can’t fall off.

I can weld the support back on just as well as Kubota. I can make a new support. I can make a new tube. A new shaft. It’s silly to be intimidated.

I am really looking forward to mowing. I think it has been three weeks. I can’t stand the thought of giving up and using the John Deere, which I haven’t sold yet. The Kubota is a dream to use. Way faster. Better cut. Excellent mulching. I get a nice breeze because I sit in front. I don’t worry about breakdowns the way I did with the John Deere. It also holds lots of fuel, so I don’t have to fill it as often.

Nobody wants to be demoted after a big promotion.

As for the engineers who got mad at me, and the ones who claim most bad engineering is forced on engineers by people in management, accounting, marketing, and sales, I have an amazing story.

When the first Corvettes (plastic-bodied cars) were rolled out, they would not start. They had to be pushed out of the factory. Why? The batteries had been grounded to fiberglass.

Darn those accountants and marketers.

Engineers designed the Hindenburg.

Curb Your White Knight Privilege

It has been a trying month, but things have gotten a lot better.

It looks like I accidentally poisoned Marv, my African grey. He appeared to be at death’s door twice. He spent two nights in the hospital. Over the last week or so, he has consistently gotten stronger and feistier, however.

Yesterday, I heard him fall off the perch. This is not all that unusual for greys even when they are well. They get overly ambitious when they climb. Marv became very weak and wobbly after he was poisoned, however, and it is wearing off slowly. I think this made him fall.

It’s not a big deal when a parrot falls off a perch. Because volume and weight increase with the cube of linear measurements, and strength increases with the square, small animals weigh a lot less for their size than animals with greater linear dimensions. For example, a horse that is two times the size of a pony will weigh eight times as much. Weight is most of what determines how dangerous a fall is, so small animals can fall from great heights without harm. You can throw a mouse off a tall building without hurting it, and a man can survive a fall that would kill a horse. A short fall won’t usually mean much to a parrot.

Still, a parrot can get banged up in a fall if he does it just right. I have seen Marv with little bruises and even black eyes over the years.

During the afternoon, I saw a bulge on Marv’s neck, and I had no idea what it was. I Googled, and my best guess was that it was an air sac rupture. Air sacs are weird cavities in birds’ bodies that connect to their lungs. An air sac rupture is not always a serious injury, and they usually heal on their own, but web sources suggested it was worth a vet visit, so we left the house at about 7:30 p.m. and got back at about 2:30.

Bottom line: it’s probably no big deal. They gave us an anti-inflammatory which I don’t plan to give Marv because it’s dangerous, and they sent us home.

Of course, the vet who saw him didn’t know much about birds. This is the big problem with parrot medical issues. Generally, if you have an emergency, you will end up with someone who isn’t trained to fix the problem. She was able to call other vets, though, so I think we are okay.

Interesting thing: the standard remedy for a ruptured air sac has changed. A rupture causes air to be released under the skin, so your bird blows up in the area of the injury. A small hole in the skin will deflate the bubble. They used to tell bird owners to poke their birds carefully with needles, but now they say to leave the bubble alone, because if you pop it, air continues to come out through the rupture, interfering with healing.

Marv already looks better, but he is still wobbly. He will be seeing a real vet later this week. Best I could do.

I lay hands on him and declare his healing, and I praise God, who said that if we lay hands on the sick, the SHALL recover. Not “might.” God is true to his word, because he is his word, and he is the truth.

I have also been slaving away, fixing the used mower I bought. As noted earlier, the deck has 4 one-inch pipes that hold anti-scalp wheels, and all of these pipes galled to the parts inside them. The seller or the old guy who originally owned the mower used heat to get the stuck parts out of the forward pipes, but it came to me with the rear wheel shafts lodged firmly. I found out when I tried to adjust them.

I tried everything anyone could possibly suggest, other than cutting the pipes off the mower and mounting them in my hydraulic press. That is coming.

Kubota’s design is really, really stupid. There is no room between the shafts and the bores, and everything is made from carbon steel. In a humid climate with temperature swings, water condenses on metal over and over during the year, and on a vertical shaft, it’s going to run downward. That puts it inside the pipe holding the shaft, where even a thin film of rust will unite the parts as though they were welded.

At first, I thought an air hammer would be overkill. I used a sledge, heat, and cold, and then I tried the air hammer, which did nothing. I tried a three-foot pipe wrench. Of course, this was after letting penetrating oil soak in for days.

I ended up drilling the left shaft out, killing my cordless drill in the process. I was using about a 1″ bit.

The drill left me with a pipe inside a pipe. I used a carbide burr, hacksaw, and sawzall to cut the pipe from inside. I ended up putting a punch between the inner and outer pipes, and I hammered to peel the inner one off. Eventually, I heard a clanging noise and saw something brown on the ground. It took me a second to realize it was the shaft. I was so used to feeling like it would never come out, it was hard for me to accept what had happened.

The miserable thing was barely rusted. Just enough to turn the shaft brown. It felt smooth. That was enough to lock it into the mower. It was covered with oil, showing that penetrating oil doesn’t do any good in some circumstances. Most, I would say.

This process involved work done over several days in the blazing sun. I strained my back in the process.

I was hoping to avoid cutting the other pipe support off the mower, but now I am committed to it. I can slice it off, put the whole business on the press, mash the shaft out, and weld the support back on in a day. That looked like a lot of work before I tackled the first one. Not any more.

I have lots of tools, and I can do lots of things, but sometimes it’s hard to take the leap and do what I can do. I know I can cut this part off my mower and put it back, better than before. It still feels wrong, somehow, but I have to do it. Sometimes I tell myself, “If you’re not willing to use your tools, sell them.”

The seller seemed like a very earnest guy, but it looks like he committed fraud. People are disappointing.

The final (!) parts for the mower arrive tomorrow, so there is hope I’ll have it together for the weekend. I hope so. I really do not want to revive the old John Deere.

People on forums are angry with me for saying Kubota’s anti-scalp-wheel engineering is stupid. It’s amazing how people white knight for big companies that don’t care about them, while persecuting fellow consumers they abuse or let down.

Brand loyalty is like a mental illness. If I say Kubota’s engineering is stupid, and you have a good counterargument, it’s fine to present it. Getting angry with me because you love Kubota makes no sense. Kubota isn’t your mother. It’s not Jesus Christ. It’s a faceless company that has no feelings. It doesn’t care about you or anyone else.

I tend to think inappropriate emotional investment in businesses is a sign of both immaturity and low intelligence. You won’t see many septuagenarian mathematicians getting in fistfights in bars because one roots for the Gators (a business) and the other roots for the ‘Noles. It’s the kind of guys who drive lowered pickups with tinted windows, loud pipes, and everything blacked out. The kind of guys who let their rottweilers run loose and get tattoos advertising Harley-Davidson.

That last thing has to be difficult to bear now that Harley-Davidson has become a major promoter of sodomy and cross-dressing.

Here’s something I find weird: people get in fights over the college teams they root for, even though no one in their families has gone to college. I have two University of Miami degrees, and I see a lot of people who clearly didn’t go to college, displaying UM paraphernalia. I have no interest in that stuff, so why should they? I have never been to a UM game, except once when I was in high school. My ultimate Frisbee team played theirs, and they killed us, although they were smoking weed on the field.

UM is a private school, which makes it even weirder. You can say you root for UF because it’s your state’s school and your tax dollars support it, and this would almost make sense to some people, but why root for a private university that doesn’t represent a city, county, state, or nation?

If you bleed green and orange, drive down to UM and ask for free season’s tickets. See how UM feels about you.

If you refuse to talk to your brother-in-law because he drives an F250, there is something wrong with you. You failed to develop to full adulthood. If it makes you mad when someone says Dodge diesel pickups have weak transmissions, you have a lot of growing up to do, but it probably won’t happen.

Getting angry at companies is perfectly reasonable. It’s normal to get angry at anyone who mistreats you. It makes me angry when companies let bad engineering a child can correct slide, causing it to fall on my head. There is no excuse. It also bothers me when a product flaw causes many people suffering and expense, and the company lies and says it’s not a known issue.

Praising companies doesn’t do much good at all, but criticizing them makes them better. They’re not like people, who draw strength from encouragement. Praising companies breeds an entitlement mindset and causes them to take consumers for granted.

People have tried to tell me a consumer should follow the manual and grease the rear shafts on my mower’s deck. Wrong. It’s not in the manual or the shop manual.

They’ve tried to tell me it’s just common sense to grease the shafts, so a person who doesn’t figure it out on his own is to blame when his mower locks up. That is SEVERELY wrong. The engineer is to blame.

1. Good engineers foresee obvious problems and take reasonable steps to prevent them from arising. Kubota didn’t do this. They made their shafts too tight. Other mower companies don’t do this, and their decks last for decades. A tight fit isn’t necessary or helpful.

2. Grease isn’t intended to prevent corrosion. It’s for lubricating moving parts. Anti-seize is the correct thing for galling prevention.

The rear shafts on my deck aren’t moving parts. For lubrication purposes, a part that moves rarely is not a moving part. The shafts have no zerks or journals. If you put grease on one, it would have to be coated by hand, end to end. Grease doesn’t distribute itself on stationary parts.

The shafts only move when you need to change the height of your deck, which could be once a year or never. The shafts lock in place after an amount of corrosion that could easily take place in one off-season.

Some guy claimed a mower would cost $40,000 if Kubota did the things I suggested. I asked him how much it would cost to change a few lines of code on a CNC machine to make the shafts slightly thinner.

He came back with an appeal to authority; his own. I didn’t understand how industry worked, but he did because he had seen it, so I had no right to speak. Removing 0.050″ from the diameter of one part would call for meetings and all sorts of other corporate turmoil. It would cost Kubota hundreds of thousands.

I told him Kubota had designed and built an entire new model after mine, full of changes much bigger than making a shaft thinner, and I asked him why it didn’t cost $40,000.

He got mad and insulted me. I’m not the one who made him walk into a door.

Imagine if the world of industry worked the way he claimed it did. “We’re thinking of replacing the 2026 Dodge Ram with a 2027 model.” “NOOOO! We’ll have to charge $200,000!” Somehow car companies manage to make changes every year. Bigger changes than thinning down one shaft.

My mower’s model comes in two versions. One before a certain serial number, and one after. The price of the mower didn’t change.

People argue with me, not because I’m wrong or rude, but because I gored their sacred ox. Kubota good, therefore anyone who criticize it very bad enemy. Must take down. Sing Kubota company song over dead body.

Another guy got mad at me, saying I was bashing all engineers. I got him to admit he was an engineer.

Engineers are wonderful. Bad engineers and bad engineering are not. I wish I had gotten an ME and an EE instead of a physics degree. I love what engineers do. I admire their accomplishments, but because I said they often did stupid things, which is so obviously true it’s almost a tautology, he felt threatened.

I took my mower’s starting system, which causes many people horrible problems, and I did and published what is probably the only thorough analysis on the web. Thanks to me, people with bad control modules can Google and make their motors run in 10 minutes. I revealed the simple answer to the deck’s galling problem, which other people have dealt with. I found a cheap source for the nylon push rivets Kubota dealers charge $2.60 for, and I revealed it on a forum. Cost: $.03 each. But I’m the bad guy because I won’t run into battle behind the Kubota flag with my chest painted orange.

I don’t care if Kubota goes bankrupt. I just want good machinery for everyone. Kubota can make it, or a company that destroys Kubota with better products can make it. I am not Kubota’s keeper.

I love Kubota products. I should stress that. My tractor is great. My zero-turn is utterly superior to my John Deere garden tractor. But nearly every complex product has flaws, and in many cases, they are stupid flaws, even when the companies that make the products are generally exemplary.

The flail mower I ordered has arrived, and it’s sitting in the driveway. Tomorrow I have to put it together and try it out. I look forward to seeing it run, because the bush hog is crude and difficult to work with.

Meanwhile, the house is a mess. I took the kitchen apart in order to paint, and then Marv got worse, so I stopped. I was in the process of fixing the pool, but I found myself driving back and forth to the animal hospital. The mower problem took up my time. The weather was unbearable for a couple of weeks. I am really hoping I can come back to life now.

Weeds and Woes

Times have been challenging of late here at the Armed Northern Florida Compound.

I accidentally poisoned Marvin and had to drive back and forth to a veterinary hospital in Gainesville several times. The zero-turn mower I thought was a bargain turned out to have a couple of problems that will require a lot of work. The temperature has approached or hit the hundred-degree mark nearly every day. And my wife is pushing to get the kitchen painted.

Marvin is fine. He gets stronger every day. What a relief. But the stress took its toll on yours truly. I went out to do outdoor work a couple of times during the last week, and I had to come back in. I felt weak. I was drained.

It made me think of my grandfather. My aunt died in May of 1994; the first of his children to go. My grandfather died in June, after losing his temper at a trashy tenant farmer and running after some cattle that got out. The night after the incident with the cattle, he had a heart attack, and he was gone after a few days. The cardiologist told me her belief was that the stress of losing my aunt caused a lesion of some sort to develop in a coronary artery, and the fracas with the tenant farmer caused it to come loose from the wall and block circulation.

Marvin is just a bird, but I really love him, and he has been with me since 1996. Over the years, I have had nightmares about bad things happening to my birds, and when Maynard died in 2021, one of the things that made it hard to bear was the fact that it was something I had dreaded–irrationally, I had thought–for a long time.

It was like having intrusive thoughts about a big shark behind you while swimming in your backyard pool, and then being bitten.

It’s possible to be hurt more by the death of a pet than the death of a person. It doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you. Different factors determine how any death affects you. I felt very bad when my mother died, but I knew it was coming, my mother was at peace with her fate, there was nothing I could do about it, she had accepted responsibility for all the cigarettes, I had a long time to get ready, and it was not my fault. It wasn’t as painful as Maynard’s death, which was sudden and preventable.

When Marvin started having seizures the other night, it was Maynard all over again, only worse, because I thought he might die in my hands, without even making it to the vet.

I have told my wife about my grandfather, and I told her to go easy on me for a while. I don’t want to push myself too hard too early.

Her prayer life is subpar these days, and it affects my welfare. The baby is an extremely powerful distraction. I am working with her to get her back up to speed. I know I am getting the short end of the stick at the moment, but this is actually normal for husbands. In a healthy, godly family, the husband and father is the one who makes the most sacrifices. Women love denying this and claiming the title of martyr, but men give more than women, unless they are substandard men.

It’s not something to resent. With authority comes added obligation. A marriage in which the woman has to do everything for the man, as though he were another child, is a sick marriage.

The mower has two anti-scalp wheels on the rear corners of the deck. They looked fine when I bought the mower, but I have learned they are stuck in place, and it is obvious the seller knew about it. They are held on two shafts that go down through little pieces of heavy pipe welded vertically to the deck. The ID of the pipe is about 1″. For some reason, Kubota practically made the clearance between the shafts and the pipes an interference fit. Then it made the shafts and pipes from steel, guaranteeing galling in wet or even humid weather. This was very bad engineering. In order to prevent galling with a fit like this, you really have to take the shafts out occasionally and put anti-seize or something on them.

An interference fit is what you have when you have to shove something in order to get it to go into something else. It means the OD of the inner thing is actually bigger than the ID of the outer thing.

Kubota didn’t even put grease fittings on these pipes. The wheels aren’t supposed to turn right or left, so I guess Kubota saw no need to call for grease. It might have prevented the galling.

The shafts have to move up and down in the pipes for adjustment purposes, but they are essentially welded in place. I tried a three-foot pipe wrench, penetrating oil, an air hammer, and a plain old big hammer, and nothing has moved the shafts at all.

I started drilling one of the shafts out. I ended up frying a nice Makita cordless drill after I got to what I believe is a 7/8″ bit. I now have a crude pipe I made myself, inside the deck pipe. I would guess I put 6 hours of work in, in the ruthless sun, bent over most of the time. Not smart.

I can now get a die grinder burr and a sawzall blade in there, so when I feel better, I plan to use both to weaken the remaining shell of the shaft until I can grab it with pliers, bend it, and pull it out.

Then I have to work on the other side.

I also broke one of the mower’s plastic fenders.

The mower came with a fuel problem. When I ran it on the left tank, it choked periodically. To fix this, I had to take the tank off and clean it out. The tank sits under a fender, and the fender is a bear to take off. I found I could loosen the fender and wiggle the tank out, but as I was doing this, the fender split.

I was wiggling it gently, but it looks like the sun had made the fender extremely brittle. The $200 fender, that is.

Now I have two new fenders coming. I could have glued the old fender together, but it would have looked awful, and the plastic would still be brittle. I should have everything put in order in about 10 days. Until then, I have to decide whether to run the mower with one fender and a bunch of stuff missing or fall back on the John Deere.

I have a flail mower on the way. I bit the bullet and bought one. I was concerned about the China tariff deal, not to mention inflation. Every time I have put off a big buy like this, the price has gone up before I gave in.

I need to be able to deal with my weeds, and the bush hog is not the right tool. It’s huge, it’s extremely dangerous, it cuts very crudely, and I just plain don’t like it. A flail mower should cut anything up to 1.5″ woody stems, and it should do it safely, leaving pretty fine clippings, closer to the ground than a bush hog.

The mower I got is a ditch mower. That means I can use hydraulics to extend it to the right of my tractor, and I can also tilt it up 90° for hedges or down quite a bit for ditches. The main thing I like about tilting it up is that it will give me access to the underside so I can work on it without lying on my back or something.

I keep thinking about buying a John Deere 4520 or 4720 tractor from the pre-emissions days. These are supposed to be very good machines, and they have considerably more grunt than my Kubota without being much larger. Maybe next year. Or maybe this year if inflation keeps hammering us.

Used tractor prices have plummeted because no one cares about the pandemic any more. People are going to work and making things and selling them, so getting a new tractor is easy, and that makes used ones less desirable.

I detest John Deere because of the way it treats customers, but I don’t have a lot of options unless I want a Buck Rogers post-emissions tractor. Which I don’t. JD should keep making parts for the 4520 and 4720 for at least another 15 years.

In around a week, I should have my flail mower, and by the end of the ensuing week, my zero-turn should be back together. Then I’ll have a couple of months of mowing before the grass and weeds go dormant, and then I can rest, during the months when the weather is cool and working on a lawnmower would actually be bearable.

Sometimes You’re Smarter Than you Think

I bought my Kubota diesel mower because I just plain felt like it. I like diesels. I like diesel everything.

But I my heart felt like it because my brain, not to mention my hands and sore back, had dealt with all sorts of problems with engines running on ethanol gas in my unusual climate. It rusts parts. It clogs carburetors unless you watch it carefully and fool with the machines no less often than once a month. It goes bad and makes engines run poorly. Electric ignition is also a likely source of aggravation. A diesel has no spark plugs.

I have suffered and spent a lot because of gas problems. I can’t count the number of times I have been unable to do an important, urgent job until I did something about an engine crippled by gasoline. I gladly paid a hundred dollars for a single gallon of gas treatment. I have probably spent $2,000 on electric yard tools in order to have options in time of need. That should show how miserable gas made me.

My brain also knew diesels lasted longer. Diesel pickup engines often go 600,000 miles before being rebuilt, and then you start the clock over.

My heart didn’t like the fact that gas engines had to run hard in order to get anything done. It just felt like an inferior way to do things. A gas mower runs at about 3,600, and a diesel runs at around 3,000. I thought the difference was bigger, but in any case, a gas engine has to spin faster to generate torque.

When I was mower shopping, I was offered a very good commercial gas mower, new, with a 35-horsepower motor, for around $13,000. I almost bought it. But I kept thinking. If a used diesel mower costs thousands less and will run the rest of my life without big problems, and it won’t have the gasoline curse, why should I buy gas?

I wasn’t sure what to think.

One of the reasons I was perplexed was that I knew professional landscapers bought a lot of gas mowers. And people on the web throw this up as proof that diesels aren’t better and don’t save money. I wondered why pros used gas when it seemed undeniable that diesel had to be better.

And if diesel wasn’t better, how did any company ever manage to sell a diesel mower, given the big cost difference?

One day in the recent past, a thought came to me. Maybe the reason pros used gas machines wasn’t because they made economic sense. Maybe they used them, and I am sorry to put it this way, because the kind of people who end up mowing yards for a living are not all clever about money.

If you’re good with money, you could very well end up in the yard business. You could end up owning 50 mowers and commanding 25 crews while you sit behind a desk in a comfortable office drinking XO brandy, but you’re not likely to end up owning one or two mowers and a trailer and doing a big part of the work yourself. And this is what most landscaping companies look like. In fact, I can’t think of a single landscaping company that has a fleet. I can’t recall hearing of any.

The issue kept bouncing around in my head, and I checked around. It turns out I was right.

Most yard guys either can’t or won’t put up $20,000 for a diesel mower when they can get similar speed and cut quality from a gas mower for $13,000. They also tend to trade mowers in, which is a bad economic move, at 1,000 or 1,500 hours.

When you trade something in to a dealer, you’re giving it to someone who has to make a profit. He will never give you full retail value because he can’t. He can’t swap mowers even. He would go out of business.

You never trade anything in unless you have no choice or you’re so rich you don’t care. You sell.

A commercial gas mower is pretty nearly the same thing as a commercial diesel mower, except for the engine and maybe different pulleys to accommodate higher engine speeds. A good gas mower will be just as sturdy, apart from the motor.

When your gas mower starts acting up at 1,500 hours, it has to be because it has a gas engine, not because the other parts are worn. If the engine lasted as long as a diesel, you would probably be able to run the mower for 3,000 hours without risking breakdowns and shop time that would hurt your business.

I think pros who get rid of low-hour gas mowers (low for the bodies, not the engines) do it because they don’t want their machines to die suddenly on the job and require new motors. This is highly likely after 1,000 hours. If your gas mower croaks when you need it, and you decide to put a new engine on it, you will be out of business until it’s fixed, and that will take days. You will lose income. You could lose customers.

On the other hand, a pro who buys diesel in the first place should be very confident until at least 3,000 hours, and at that point, he should be able to get over $5,000 for it. A retired $1,000-hour gas mower will bring around $3,000 in a private sale (less if traded), and the landscaper will miss out on 2,000 valuable hours of use he would have gotten from a diesel.

On top of that, diesels save their owners on fuel because they burn less. And they have to be filled up less often.

Most yard men are not in a position to buy mowers with cash. It’s a lot easier to finance a $13,000 mower than a $20,000 mower. Even if it costs more in the long run, you can only buy as much mower as your cash or credit will allow.

I think gas mowers are much worse investments for professionals, but I believe they buy them anyway because they generally lack judgment and/or capital. I think a lot of them are buying things like bass boats, cruise and Disney World tickets, bar drinks, restaurant meals, and other lifestyle items they really can’t afford, and this makes the capital problem worse.

This is normal for working Americans in jobs that draw people who haven’t done much to train themselves for good careers. I think most of them have big debt loads, and a big percentage have negative net worths.

My mother taught me that the rich pay less for everything, and as a generalization, it’s true. The rich don’t rent-to-own $400 couches and end up paying $800 after interest and fees. The rich buy stuff that costs more up front but ends up costing less. The rich don’t live on credit card debt. They don’t get student loans. They can pay cash for things and get cash discounts.

They don’t buy cigarettes one at a time outside Korean groceries.

My mother was a realtor, and she told me Jewish parents with kids at the University of Miami got their kids free housing. They were buying their kids condos instead of paying rent. The condos appreciated, and they could, of course, rent rooms to roommates. After college, they had accumulated wealth while everyone else had paid rent, paying off their landlords’ mortgages and increasing their wealth. Free housing, plus equity other people paid for.

Back in law school, I knew a student who paid his tuition with American Express. It didn’t cost him any more than using cash, and he got a lot of points at $11,000 per semester. I do the same thing with my medical insurance. They don’t give cash discounts, so American Express is better.

I pay my bill in full every month, so I don’t pay interest. There are people out there paying 18% annually to credit card companies on top of their premiums because they have no choice.

I knew another student who bought a convertible Camaro with student loan money. His friends called it “the Ferrari,” because they figured it would end up costing him as much as one. I remember hearing students talk about loans. They would say it was a bad idea to order pizza, because it would end up costing $40.

The main lawyer I clerked for in law school owned his office because he could pay for it. He rented it to himself, and this reduced his taxes, in addition to making him richer through appreciation. This is what my dad planned to do back when we had hopes of having a firm in our own building. I knew other lawyers who paid rent and didn’t get anything but tax deductions. My boss died with a net worth somewhere north of $10 million (after a divorce) that he admitted to, and knowing him, he probably hid a lot. He had a huge motorsailer and a twin-engine plane, he drove a Jag, and he did not deprive himself of much of anything.

My grandfather owned a huge amount of real estate because people knew he had money, and they went to him when they needed to sell property in a hurry. He was able to give them cash and get good prices, and they were happy to do business with him. If he had been in a worse position, he would not have been able to buy distressed properties fast.

When I had nothing, I bought a car at 11% interest. That’s how poor people get things. At 11% per year, the interest alone was 55% of the principal. To a person with a net worth, it was a $13,000 car. To a person with nothing, a car like that could cost over $20,000, depending on how much was financed.

It’s seems odd that people with less pay more, but it does make sense.

I am not good with money because I don’t study it, and I have wasted a lot, but I’m not completely hopeless. I can tell the difference between a $6,000 lifetime lawnmower and a $13,000 lawnmower that loses over $1,500 in value as it leaves the dealership and may end up costing $19,000 because it has a motor that won’t last.

I don’t know why I didn’t pay attention to my own common sense. In this world, it’s very important not to assume other people know what they’re talking about.

Like I always say, Oprah Winfrey gives people dieting, marriage, and parenting advice. Enough said.

You Can’t Stop the Signal

The clouds have parted. Today I got my Kubota mower to start and run normally. Sort of.

When I bought the mower, the seller had no trouble starting it and putting it on his trailer. Then it started acting up on me, and then it quit starting altogether.

For reasons I consider stupid, this mower has a very complicated starting system. I can’t imagine how much worse it would be if it ran on gas.

You can’t just say, “It won’t crank, so it’s part A.” A given problem could be caused by any of several bad parts. I decided to start out by looking at fixes that were easy and/or cheap and/or highly likely to work. When that didn’t work out, I got systematic. I studied and worked with AI, and I came up with 5 possible problems. There are others, but these were highest on the Occam’s Razor list.

I wrote out a list of problems and the ways I should approach them. Then things got worse and worse. I would work on one problem and find out it didn’t help. Then I would work on another one and get the same result. All this time, the list was dwindling, I was suffering, and I was getting closer and closer to the most expensive problem on the list: the mowers $330 electronic control module (“ECM” or “controller”).

Everything has to be computerized these days. My toaster is computerized. It’s not clear WHY everything has to be computerized, but it’s definitely true. Don’t question it.

Cars are full of computers now, and the disease has spread to small ag and landscaping machines. As you probably know, these computers cost a lot, losing one is a crippling blow, and manufacturers stop making them after a while, so you could end up with a useless machine simply because the computer is no good.

Somehow tractors and mowers used to run without computers, but trust me; they can’t run without them now. Just believe. Don’t think.

Originally, I thought my controller was important. I thought Kubota would not put it in a machine unless it did important things. It turns out I was totally wrong about that.

I thought the controller managed everything. Engine speed. Gauges. The transmission. Whatever. Because who would have an expensive, proprietary controller made if it didn’t do important things?

Last night, I went deeper into the starting mystery. I got out the schematic for the system. I wrote up my own analysis. You can read my analysis and understand everything about the starting system.

What I learned was annoying. The controller serves only two purposes. It prevents the mower from starting if the lawyer switches aren’t just right, and it also tells the mower to shut down when you turn the key to the off position.

I’m not kidding. It’s totally unnecessary. You can make the switches and the shut-off solenoid do their thing with analog parts of the kind Radio Shack used to sell.

CORRECTION: I forgot to mention the third function of the controller. It runs a horn that goes off when the mower overheats. You can rely on this to protect your investment. Or you could just look at the temperature gauge once in a while.

The key tries to send a signal to a relay. If it succeeds, the relay relays the signal to the starter, and the mower starts. The controller butts in and decides whether the relay is allowed to send the signal. If even one of the 5 safety switches is in the wrong position, your mower goes nowhere.

A relay contains an internal switch. The controller operates the switch, and the switch sends the signal to the starter. If you short the switch terminals, you cut the controller out of the game. It has no say. It’s like an enraged Karen, screeching at you from behind foot-thick glass. The mower starts and runs.

Shorting is exactly what I decided to do. I need to mow my yard regularly without long breaks due to starting problems. The weather is like the weather in an air fryer. I don’t feel like spending another week or two covered in mower grease, removing and installing parts and finding out it doesn’t help.

Because I always have wire and spade connectors around, like a normal person, I made a short wire with a spade on each end, and I shoved it into the receptacle the relay ordinarily goes into. The mower started and ran like a champ.

The safety switches did not work, so I had to be careful not to do obviously-stupid things. I didn’t start the mower with the transmission or blades engaged. I didn’t jump off the mower while it was moving and lie down in front of it. Things like that. It was challenging.

When I was done, I had to get off and push a little lever on the engine to shut it down. Whew. That was hard. The lever is always exposed, and it’s easy to reach.

Will I ever get around to putting the safety switches and key shut-off in order? Maybe. It should be very simple with cheap components.

If the controller is no good, I don’t think I should replace it, because it costs a lot and could go bad again, and I would rather not depend on Kubota to keep making them. Parts prices keep skyrocketing, and that’s another factor. If the mower can be made to work without a controller, I should fix it so it doesn’t need one.

I don’t want the parking brake switch because I can’t understand why it exists. Why do you need the brake to be on when you start the engine? With the brake off, the mower could roll downhill, but then it could do that whether you start it or not, and if it’s going to roll downhill, you should notice this before starting it, because the mower will be…rolling downhill.

The other switches make some sense. You don’t want the mower starting in gear or has the blades engaged, because it’s bad for the mower and makes you feel stupid. I don’t think that little starter will successfully crank the engine when the transmission or PTO is engaged, though. That would be some starter.

Because you sit on the front of the mower, the seat switch is a good thing to have. It is possible to fall off and land in front of the mower, and without the switch, it could keep on going, and then you would be julienned. The seat has a belt, though, so it’s not like the switch is necessary.

My John Deere’s seat switch shuts the motor off when you dismount, no matter what. That’s horrible. The Kubota only shuts the motor down when the blades are engaged. That’s fine. That’s how it should be done. The mower shouldn’t quit every time you have to get off to move a stick. You should be able to stop the PTO and leave the motor running.

I can make a circuit to shut off the fuel with the key. It’s more complicated than jumping the starter relay, but it’s not hard, either. Or I could just install a shopmade cable that allows me to pull the shutdown lever from the seat.

Bypassing the controller will never, ever cost me any useful function, but it will save me the horror of trying to test it, as well as the horror of paying for a new one if the old one is bad.

Why did Kubota make the controller? They must have had some reason for making an expensive, unrepairable part that does things cheap, easily-repaired parts can do.

Figuring out whether the controller is no good is not easy. Wire connections inside the plug and receptacle can fail. The ground can fail. Relay problems and ignition switch problems may look like controller problems. Kubota’s workshop manual doesn’t list any ways to test a controller, so their mechanics don’t know how to do anything with them.

I guess you can turn your ignition key and see if the controller sends a signal to the starter relay, but it could fail to do that because of a well-hidden problem in the wiring harness. That happened to one guy who wrote about it on the web.

In order to be sure the controller is bad, you really have to buy a new controller, plug it in, and see what happens. If the mower runs, the controller was bad. If not, you learn nothing at all, you still have a puzzle to solve, and you have a dirty part the dealer won’t take back.

The controller is dumb. That’s what it boils down to. It protects Kubota’s lawyers and does nothing a simpler set of components can’t do.

One great thing about learning that the controller is idiotic is that it tells me my fuel-delivery problems have nothing to do with the controller. The mower was slowing down and almost stopping, randomly. I looked this up, and a bad source told me it could be caused by a bad controller. This is not true. It might be true in a car or some other machine with a real computer, but it’s not true in the case of Kubota’s rinky-dink lawyer toy. The controller can’t affect the fuel supply unless it cues the shut-off solenoid at the wrong time, and if it did that, the mower would stop, not slow down.

I thought I needed new fuel filters, so I ordered some. On a recommendation, I also put Clear-Diesel in both tanks. Today, the right tank ran like a Tesla on cruise control, but on the left tank, the mower slowed down. That tells me the fuel in the left tank is probably bad. If the filters were bad, the mower would run badly on both tanks.

I don’t know if Clear-Diesel will help the left tank. If not, I can always dump the diesel in the woods. I mean in a proper receptacle.

I ordered new relays because one of mine tested bad. I later learned the reason it tested bad is that the manual is wrong. It told me to expect an impossible resistance across two terminals. I think the Japanese guy who wrote the Japanese manual also wrote the English manual, and I think he was drunk the whole time.

In case anyone else out there has a ZD326 or ZD331 that won’t start, I’ll paste what I wrote about the starting system. You can find the workshop manual online in PDF form. I don’t promise what I wrote is correct, but I promise it’s a lot better than your wild guesses.

KUBOTA ZD326 STARTING CIRCUITRY

Some of this material is repetitious because it makes it easier to understand. Wire color codes follow at the end.

OVERVIEW

The starting system’s main parts of interest are the ignition switch, ECM (controller), starter relay, starter (includes solenoid), two NO motion lever safety switches, one NO seat safety switch, one NO PTO lever safety switch, and one NC brake safety switch.

N=normally. O=open. C=closed. “Normal” means the mower will not start.

PURPOSE OF ECM

The ECM’s only purposes relevant to starting and running are 1) to monitor the safety switches and either agree or refuse to tell the starter relay to start, and 2) to power the relay that shuts down the mower. When the key is turned to the stop position, the ECM closes the shut-off relay for about 10 seconds, cutting off fuel.

The ECM also makes the horn blow when the mower overheats, but there is an independent temperature gauge on the control panel.

The ECM does not do anything essential, like making the engine run correctly. It can be bypassed completely if necessary. The ECM is not likely to fail, but if everything else has been checked, and the symptoms are consistent with ECM failure, it has to be replaced. It can’t be repaired without extraordinary effort.

A failed ECM can cause the mower to refuse to crank or stop. A failed shut-off solenoid can prevent the mower from starting and stopping, but it can’t prevent it from cranking.

A bad ground or other connection can simulate ECM failure.

The ECM has 9 connections.

OR = positive from PTO switch
BR = positive to starter relay coil
GB = positive from left motion control lever switch
WL = power to shut-off solenoid.
B = ground
YR = positive from seat switch
RY = positive from ignition switch terminal AC
WB = positive from brake switch
RW = positive to shut-off relay coil

RELATIONSHIP OF IGNITION SWITCH TO ECM

The ignition switch has a rotating conductor (terminal B) which is turned by the key and always hot. It is always connected to the R positive wire. When turned to any position other than off (glow plug, start), it is in contact with terminal AC, which can be considered the ignition’s ECM terminal.

Terminal AC is connected to the ECM (controller) and all safety switches (motion lever, seat, PTO, brake). The motion lever switches are in series, so 13 (right) is connected to RY and AC, and 14 (left) is connected to the ECM, providing positive input. The path goes AC-RY-left switch-right switch-ECM.

NORMAL START PROCEDURE

To start, close every switch except the brake switch (levers at rest, PTO off, operator in seat), and open the brake switch by applying the brake. Turn the key partially, letting the glow plug heat if needed. Then turn to the start position and hold until the engine starts.

BYPASSING SWITCHES

The brake safety switch is normally closed (NC). All others are NO. Because it’s NC, the brake switch can be bypassed by pulling the connector and covering it. To bypass the other switches, you have to jump them.

HOW IGNITION SWITCH WORKS IN GLOW PLUG POSITION

When the ignition switch is turned partially, it first connects hot terminal B to both terminal AC and terminal 19. Terminal AC feeds the ECM via the RY wire, and terminal 19 runs the glow plug lamp and glow plug.

Terminal 19 is not significant for starting, running, or stopping the mower. Current goes through terminal 19, the lamp and plug, and then to ground. The mower should start and run fine when 19 is out of commission unless the glow plug is needed.

IMPORTANCE OF TERMINAL AC AND RY WIRE TO STARTING

The RY wire that goes from terminal AC to the ECM sends signal through all safety switches along the way. The safety switches all get positive from RY.

IF TERMINAL AC IS BAD OR WIRE RY ISN’T LIVE, THE MOWER WILL NOT START BECAUSE IT WILL ASSUME A MOTION LEVER SWITCH OR THE PTO SWITCH IS IN THE WRONG POSITION.

THE ECM HAS A SINGLE GROUND, AND IF IT FAILS, THE ECM WILL NOT WORK, CAUSING STARTING AND STOPPING PROBLEMS.

HOW IGNITION SWITCH WORKS IN START POSITION

When the ignition switch is turned past the glow plug position, it disconnects 19 and connects hot B to AC and terminal 50 (BY). Terminal 50 feeds voltage through the BY wire to the starter relay. If the relay is closed, the voltage goes out through the BW wire to the starter solenoid. This is the voltage that tells the starter solenoid to turn.

The starter relay is closed by the ECM (not the ignition switch) through the BR wire. The current exits through the relay coil to the B wire (ground). Don’t confuse the B (black) wire with the ignition switch B terminal.

To start the mower, the ECM needs to see safety switch positive at YR (seat), OR (PTO), and GB (left motion lever in series with right). It needs to see RY positive next to the brake switch WB input. If it sees positive at the input from the brake switch (WB), the mower will not start. WB should be neither positive nor negative when the mower starts. No input.

STARTER RELAY

The starter relay is #6 in the manual’s diagram. It connects to BR (ECM), BY (ignition positive, terminal 50), BW (positive signal to starter), and B (ground) wires. It has 5 connections, one of which is not used. It switches between two poles; off (87A, dead) and on (87, BW). In the rest state, the switch connects the dead pole. Terminal 87 is the BW wire which goes to the starter solenoid.

Terminals 85 (BR) and 86 (B) send ECM juice through the coil. They are connected to the BR (ECM hot output) and B (ground) wires. The B wire is not important for analysis, since it never changes. A positive input has to be connected to BR in order for the relay to close, and the ECM does this. BR exits the ECM next to OR, if the schematic is any indication.

When the relay closes, it connects the relay switch’s BY wire (positive input from terminal 50) to the BW wire that feed the starter solenoid. This starts the mower.

On the schematic, from top to bottom, the starter relay connections are:
1. ECM – BR
2. Ignition switch – BY
3. Starter – BW
4. Ground – B

Jumping BY and BW should bypass the ECM and start the mower without harming anything. UPDATE: I tested this, and it works just fine.

The shut-off solenoid can also be set up this way, but you have to put in a timer or a momentary switch, because if the solenoid is always trying to shut off when the key is in the stop position, the battery will drain.

The manual shut-off lever is easily reached at the right rear of the mower.

TESTING RELAYS

All three relays on the mower are the same. You can test resistances to see if they are working. The manual’s test resistances are wrong.

Resistances: 85-86: ~90 ohms (coil)
87-87A: infinite
87-30: infinite
30-87A: 0 ohms

REMOVING IGNITION SWITCH

Use a pin spanner to turn the outer switch cover to unscrew it. Remove the cover over the motion lever arm switch. Remove all screws from the control panel so it is loose. Push the ignition switch down under the panel, pull it out between the panel and fender, depress the tab on the connector, and remove the switch.

DISASSEMBLING IGNITION SWITCH

There are two tabs on the sides of the switch housing. Pull them outward while pushing up on the key cylinder (keyhole). It helps to put a small object in a vise and rest the key cylinder on it while you pull the tabs and push the switch down.

By comparing the ignition wire colors to the switch’s terminals, you can figure out which terminal does what and how to check resistances to see if the switch is good. Removing oxidation from the copper contacts can reduce excess resistance.

WIRE COLOR CODES

B black
BR black/red
BW black/white
BY black/yellow
G green
GB green/black
L blue
LW blue/white
OR orange
ORL orange/blue
P pink
R red
RB red/black
RG red/green
RL red/blue
RW red/white
RY red/yellow
V violet
W white
WB white/black
WG white/green
WL white/blue
Y yellow
YL yellow/blue
YR yellow/red
YW yellow/white

That Little White Thing Behind the Grass is my House

The Kubota mower saga continues. The mower which was supposed to be my deliverer has become my captor, forcing me to spend hours and hours working on it. Yesterday I had to come up with a new strategy to fix it.

Clearly, this means I have to discuss Richard Feynman.

Being smart is a good thing, obviously, but it has its drawbacks. It can actually cause you to behave stupidly in practice. If you go through life figuring things out effortlessly or having answers just come to you, you can find yourself floundering when a puzzle is actually challenging, because you haven’t done what less-intelligent people do when confronted with hard questions. You haven’t come up with logical strategies to solving problems. As a result, you may find yourself struggling with problems people with less brains cope with more easily. You sit there waiting for answers to come, cycling through ideas that have already failed, like a bear pawing at a combination lock.

Richard Feynman claimed his IQ was 125. And Oprah claimed she lost like 150 pounds in about a month without drugs. Feynman had an impish sense of humor, so I guess this was one of his little jokes, intended to upset less-intelligent people who knew their IQ’s were up in the 180 range and make them wonder how Mr. 125 had left them in the dust.

I don’t think his IQ was 125, but I think that if it had been, he would have punched above his weight because of his approach to thinking.

I read a story he wrote about ants. He saw ants marching around in a dorm room, and he started asking himself why they did certain things. Using bait and some other handy objects, he was able to do several experiments and uncover some pretty remarkable facts about ants. He was systematic. He developed logical approaches. He didn’t sit back and think, “I’m a genius, so I’ll know the answer in a minute regardless of what I do.”

I thought about that story yesterday after a most miserable day working on my new mower in the heat and roasting sun. It was starting intermittently when I got it, and then it just plain quit, and I had to start hot-wiring it.

When I looked for answers, I decided the smart thing was to take care of the easiest and/or most likely and/or cheapest fixes instead of getting into a lot of diagnostic drudgery. If they worked, great. If not, I would have new parts in my mower which couldn’t hurt anything and might help it stay running longer without problems.

This kind of approach only works when you get lucky, which usually happens for me, but in this case, didn’t.

Having suffered considerably in the process of replacing two safety switches that were likely to have failed but actually hadn’t, I decided to change course and take the Feynman approach. I went to AI sites, I looked at the workshop manual, and I tried to make deductions and formulate a plan.

I came up with 5 problems that could prevent a mower from cranking. The seat switch had been bypassed, and the crude, bubbastic bypass connection could be failing. A safety switch on the brake, the PTO lever, or one of the mower control levers could be bad. The starter or solenoid (one indivisible package) could be bad. The starter relay could need replacing. Finally, the ignition switch could be no good.

It was also possible the mower’s electronic controller needed replacing, but that was too unlikely to consider at this point.

By the time I made the list, the switches on the PTO lever and brake had already been replaced needlessly, and I knew the starter and solenoid were fine, so I moved on. I tried to come up with a smart sequence of things to look at.

The seat switch splice had to be my first stop because it could get me going in 5 minutes. It seemed likely to be the problem because the mower had started once after I moved the seat. It was also an extremely simple fix. Find the splice and redo it with a wire nut. Tools not required.

Number two: the starter relay. This was not as likely to be the culprit as the safety switches, but checking it with an ohmmeter was a 10-minute job requiring the ohmmeter, a wrench, and a screwdriver.

Number three: the safety switches. The remaining switches were not nearly as hard to replace as the ones I had already worked on, but they were harder to deal with than the relay, so I would leave them for later. Testing them would be simple. They had to be open for the mower to run, so I can just disconnect them.

Number four: the ignition switch. Kubota didn’t make a point of creating handy test points for people with bad ignition switches, and getting the switch out to test it is unpleasant. I could test it by opening a connector on the wiring harness to expose a couple of conductors. That would be more pleasant than removing the switch, but still unpleasant. The switch worked fine in every position except the start position, so I figured it was probably okay.

Today I identified the starter solenoid by the colors of the wires going into it, and it took me two minutes or so to get it out. The manual lists the proper resistances between the terminals, and the relay failed one test. I went to Ebay and ordered three new relays (the mower uses the same kind of relay for three things), and they are on the way. They’re $10 each, and if one has failed, the others could be on the way out.

Will the new relay get my mower running? No idea, but it should. I can test my theory by moving one of the other relays to the starter position. One relay only controls a horn that goes off when the mower overheats, so I can do without that for a few days.

I should have switched the relays after testing the bad one, but what can I tell you? It’s hot outside. Feynman would be ashamed of me.

If the relays don’t help me, I have to test the safety and ignition switches, and after that, I have to consider the possibility that a $332 controller has bitten the dust. I think I tested the relay correctly, though, and the mower can’t start if it’s bad, so I have every reason to think I will not need a controller.

I caused myself a lot of very unpleasant and unnecessary work by guessing at the mower’s ailment. If Feynman were here, he would have gotten where I am in two days. Nobody could do it faster except someone who is familiar with Kubotas. Two days is how long it would take to understand the starting system, including an hour or two to come up with a plan.

I should try to take the Feynman approach to problems from now on, during what little remains of my life. Prayer first. Then research and logic. I can’t get back all the hours I’ve spent nullifying my intelligence by hoping answers fall out of the sky, but I should be able to benefit to some limited degree.

Victory Delayed is Sweet When it Arrives

Time for an update on the used mower I bought. It’s a 25-horsepower Kubota ZD326 diesel zero-turn.

I should begin with the mower’s age. I sent what I thought was the serial number to Kubota, and they said it was made in 2015. I thought that was great, because it suggested the mower had well below 1,000 hours. Someone has burst my bubble, however. I have been informed that the number I found is the number for the part it was attached to: the ROPS (Roll Over Protection System). A ROPS is a roll bar.

Kubota likes to put serial numbers all over the place. My deck has one, the mower itself has one, and they even put one on the ROPS.

The ACTUAL serial number is a little more than twice the ROPS number, so this is probably a pre-2010 mower. I have not checked yet.

If this mower was in use for 15 years instead of 10, in serious residential use, it should still come in at under 1,000 hours. Maybe less than 500. But I would rather have a 2015 mower than a 2009 mower.

The first time I tried to start the mower, I failed. I found it would start if I fiddled with things and tried starting it a few times. I was able to mow the yard the first time I tried. On Saturday, three days ago, fiddling didn’t work. I couldn’t mow. Fiddling hasn’t worked since.

I thought the mower wouldn’t start because I had failed to put the PTO lever in the right position. The PTO lever has a safety switch on it so the mower blades don’t start turning when you start the engine. I found out this was not the problem. I’m not sure what the issue is, but I have bought some parts, and I am going through the starting system bit by bit.

I replaced the safety switch on the parking brake, and that didn’t help. I have ordered other safety switches so I can replace them. There are switches on the levers you use to steer the machine.

I eventually learned how to hotwire the mower, so I am able to mow while I go through the process of fixing it.

When I hotwired the mower today in order to mow, I thought things were going great, but then it stalled when I moved the control levers. Through trial and error, I found out that I had to bypass the brake switch in order to keep the motor running. As soon as I moved the levers with the switch installed, the motor died. I don’t know what this means yet, but the mower runs with the switch unplugged, so I will be able to mow until I figure things out.

It looks like I installed the wrong part. The safety switches on this think look alike. Some are open by default, and some are closed. Not a big deal, since the old switch tests fine and can be put back in.

I could remove the switch permanently. I don’t need a parking brake switch. My mower isn’t going to roll across Florida while I try to start it. If I lived in Colorado, maybe I would want to keep the switch. This particular switch is not needed in order to make the mower run. If you remove it, the mower starts and runs fine.

Getting to the PTO safety switch is not easy. The mower’s control panel is on the right fender, and a bunch of things go through the panel. Wiring for the idiot lights. Two levers. A big, stiff knob that controls the cutting height. In order to change the switch, you have to remove the panel, and to get the panel off, you have to remove the knob.

The problem with removing the knob is that it is held onto a thick shaft by friction, and it does not want to come off. I tried doing it as gently as I could, and I broke one side of the knob. I believe the right way to get the knob off is to remove a cotter pin from the shaft, down under the fender, but getting to the cotter pin is hard because…the control panel is in the way. I think it can be done with the right long-nose pliers, which I probably have.

I had to order an $11 knob and the decal that goes on the knob and lists the cutting heights.

Believe it or not, I’m making all this sound a lot easier than it was, and I’m leaving a lot of suffering out.

Oh…hey…I just found out the cotter pin is really a clevis pin. That makes things a lot easier. I don’t have to bend a clevis pin closed in order to pull it out or insert it.

I’ve also had to deal with fluids. The guy who sold me the mower put too much fluid in the hydraulic system, so I had to remove and throw out half a gallon of expensive Kubota SUDT2. He also put maybe 12 ounces more oil in the engine than was needed, so I had to drain it into a pan. I don’t know whether he changed the fluid in the deck gearbox, so I’ll be doing that shortly. It’s not hard, so it will be fast. IF ALL GOES WELL. Always add that.

Today I got the mower going, and I mowed quite a bit. Then the mower started slowing down, as though it were going to die. I thought this might be because I had run one of the tanks dry on the previous outing. This mower has two tanks (don’t ask me why), and you have to switch from one tank to the other when your first tank is empty.

When a diesel goes dry, and you start it up again after restoring the fuel flow, you may find there is air in the system somewhere, and depending on the diesel, it will clear the air out on its own, or you will have to do it yourself via a process which may be horrible. When my mower started stumbling, I hoped it would push the air out without help.

The mower slowed down more than once, and it kept speeding up again, so I thought the air was being eliminated. Eventually, though, I had to switch tanks. Then the mower ran well…until it didn’t. When things got bad, I started heading for the house, and the mower died in the driveway, blocking my car in the garage.

I figured it had to be the fuel filter. I looked it up, and a bad fuel filter can make a diesel with a governor slow down temporarily. It will increase the throttle to try to compensate for the reduced fuel flow, but if the flow gets bad enough, the motor will die anyway.

Does my motor even have a governor? No idea. There must be something in there that keeps the maximum RPM’s down, because this mower is supposed to mow at full tilt boogie.

I read and read, and eventually, I started to wonder if I was the problem. Maybe I had simply run out of diesel on the last tank, AFTER having air problems with the first.

I have looked at the owner’s and workshop manual a lot, but I never bothered to read about the fuel gauge. I figured I was smart enough to read one on my own. That may have been a fateful bit of hybris.

This mower has a fuel gauge on the control panel. It also has a yellow idiot light with “RH TANK” printed beside it. I didn’t really think about what this meant. I didn’t look at it much at all. I figured the fuel gauge measured the fuel in whichever tank I was using, and that if the idiot light went on, I was on the right-hand tank.

It turns out the fuel gauge is only for the port, or secondary, tank. You’re supposed to run on the starboard tank until the idiot light comes on. It means that tank is low. Then you switch to the left tank, and the gauge tells you how much fuel you have left until you’re stranded.

I now think I had air in the lines, switched to the right tank, and then ran it dry while assuming it had plenty of fuel in it. The gauge read full.

The mower sat in the driveway for maybe two hours while I tried to figure things out. I put some fuel in each tank, started the mower, and took off. It did slow down briefly, but it kept going.

The diesel in the tanks looks pure. I don’t think the fuel filters are clogged. I ordered a couple anyway because new diesel filters are always a good idea. Kubota put them in a funny place, so changing them will take at least 30 minutes. IF ALL GOES WELL. I am learning.

Tomorrow a lot of parts arrive, so I will be changing switches, the armrests, and a few other things. I plan to dump the oil but keep the filter, since it’s new. I think the seller used 40w, which is probably okay in this climate, but I want to put synthetic 15w-40 in it, as the manual suggests. The small amount of 40w, if that’s what it is, in the filter won’t be enough to mess up the properties of the 15w-40.

I’m going to check the ignition switch. I don’t see why I need one, so if it’s hinky, I may replace it with a momentary switch I already have.

Everyone who likes stealing mowers knows how to hotwire one in 10 seconds, so it appears the only person the ignition switch prevents from running the mower is me. And a mower with a momentary switch where the ignition switch used to be would be a lot easier to identify for the police. Not that they ever make any effort whatsoever to recover stolen goods.

I was only able to mow about 60% of my yard today. The parts I mowed looked fantastic. The John Deere never saw the day it could cut this well. Or maybe it did, but I didn’t know how to make it do it. The cut is flat and pretty, and I can actually tell where I’ve already mowed. With the John Deere, I had to guess.

I bought mulching blades, but I think I might send them back. I’ve only used this mower 1.6 times, with standard blades, and it has minced my oak leaves. I feel like dropping to my knees and thanking God. The JD simply could not do this. Don’t ask me why.

Those leaves were a source of what seemed as if it would be eternal torment. Gathering and burning them was a job for Sisyphus plus Hercules. Nearly undoable. My John Deere mulching kit made a big difference when the mower actually ran, but not like the Kubota. I am now confident I can end my leaf problem permanently just by riding around on a lawnmower. I’m almost afraid to believe it.

The leaf debris is still with me, but it seems like 80% of it has disappeared. I don’t know where it went. I used to have thick carpets of dead leaves, and the leaf fragments I now have seem to have maybe 20% of the volume.

No one but me could ever understand why having the Kubota disintegrate my leaves is such a big deal to me. You would have to have been there when I bought a $600 leaf blower and tried making piles which I raked and put into a wagon or utility cart and hauled off and burned. You would have to have been beside me when I went to a mower store and nearly let a guy convince me a used 48″ gas mower would do it. I brought a landscaper out here for an interview. I nearly bought a $1,500 towed leaf vacuum.

Nobody ever told me, “Get a big-ass commercial diesel zero-turn, and your leaves will disappear.” This, in a county where you can hardly toss a dwarf without hitting a zero-turn on a trailer. It seems like every third vehicle on the road is a pickup pulling landscaping tools. Why couldn’t anyone give me the answer? Didn’t they know?

The Kubota moves twice as fast as a tractor like the John Deere. That makes a big difference. It makes a 60″ deck mow like 120″. And it turns in place, so you don’t have to sworp out in wasted loops every time you turn around. You just stop at the end of a strip you’ve mowed, turn where you are, and mow a strip next to it. I thought a zero-turn might mow twice as fast as a tractor. No; it’s faster than that. You move faster, and you travel a much shorter distance.

The mower puts a lot of filth in the air, and about half of it lands on me, but this was also true of the John Deere. Nothing can be done. I take my boots off in the garage, and I take my clothes off in the laundry room, which has a tile floor which is easy to clean.

I bought myself a fancy dirt biking mask to keep everything out of my eyes. The manufacturer is a company called Wolfsnout. They also make foam dust masks. I ordered one of those, too. They say you can breathe freely with this mask. Not true. When I put it on, I breathed like Heavy D on the slopes of Everest, and my nose ran into the foam. I can’t make it work. But a stretchy neck gaiter works well with the mask. My eyes use to be a mess the night after a mow. Not any more.

Tomorrow may be the first day I use the mower without major annoyances. I may have to hotwire it again, but I have reasonable hopes it will finish up the yard without dying.

If this thing turns out to have severe hidden issues that make it a horror to deal with, I might actually snap and spend $19,000 on a new one. Life is short, and I can only take so much. I realize I can pay a crew for over three years for that kind of money, but I am utterly fed up with mowing struggles, and I am going to see an end to them no matter what it takes. This is the single most annoying problem I have as a homeowner.

I could get a new gas mower that would do the same thing for $13,000 but I am ALL DONE WITH GAS. When I say I’m not going back, I feel like one of those guys who rushes the police, with two shots left in a rusty .22 pistol he stole from his grandmother, screaming he’s not going back to prison. I understand them. I’m not buying another big gas carb I have to rebuild every year. I’m not dealing with another rusted gas tank. I don’t want to buy any more ethanol-busting additive than I already have.

I’m old. I don’t need this. My son doesn’t need an inheritance. He’s good-looking. He can be a model.