My lawnmower wouldn’t start. It’s been wonderful over the several years I’ve had it. A Toro. Bought from The Home Despot. Dependable. Well, it just wouldn’t start. So I folded it up and jammed it into the back end of my SUV and drove down to the local branch. They took it in for “diagnosis” and told me a technician would look at it and call me if the repair was going to be over $100, an amount I had to authorize to leave it there.
Time passed. I heard nothing. I called. The guy in Tool Rental told me they had done the minor repairs they could at the store and wanted to send it to the repair facility in Indianapolis for a carburetor rebuild. I told them they could and was informed it would take about two to four weeks door to door.
Four weeks passed and I heard nothing. I called. After some “hold, please” time, the Tool Rental guy called back and told me that my mower had been lost in the system and was still sitting at the store having never been shipped out for repair, But, he said, he would fix it “like new.”
He called to tell me it’s fixed. I went down to pick it up with a friend in his pickup. We got it home to find out that the accelerator cable was so rusted that it would not work (start, run, stop). The next step was to borrow a single-axle beat-to-crap trailer from a friend on which a wire-tied the lawnmower and took it back to The Home Depot.
The technician actually preened when I picked it up (oh, we went in the friend’s pickup again). “It’s just like it came from the factory,” he exclaimed. I started it up; it ran. We loaded it up and took it home. However, when I started it up to actually mow real grass, it choked and stopped and had to be restarted and restarted and restarted. I was NOT going to take it back!
I called Stu, who knows how to repair anything. He came over and fiddled with a screw driver and a pair of needle-nose pliers and it ran fine. However, the adjusting screws wouldn’t stay put and wiggled in and out. A piece of flagging tape solved that issue. Then the cover of part of the engine fell off – seems as if the screws that held it into place either were never replaced or had fallen out a long time ago with the techie never noticing. We found two that fit, put them in, and it’s fixed as good as it’s going to be.
Lessons learned: (1) As cheery as a technician can be about how he is going to help you and how it’s fixed “like new” can only be proven in the field, the actual field. (2) It’s good to have a friend with a pickup; it’s good to have a friend who knows how to tinker with lawnmowers. (3) Find a dealer for the brand of thing you want repaired instead of your local hardware chain.
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