Good Night Lawnmower

            The grass is asleep; the trees have tucked in the soil, and all that lives beneath them, with the last of their falling leaf comforters. All of nature seeming to be saying; “good night, see you in the spring”.
            Even the garden tools are getting comfortable on the nails where they’ve stayed motionless for the past three to four weeks.  But, there are a couple of lawn and garden conveniences that are still looking for that glass of warm milk and bedtime story.

             The lawn mower is one of them.

 

             The bedtime story would be the owner’s manual; look it over to see if there be any grease fitting that need a shot of the slippery stuff. It will also tell you the type of oil needed in the crank case (this would be the warm milk I spoke of), and any other maintenance activities that are needful to your mower

       My routine for a good starting engine in the spring goes as follows:

                  * Drain out all but a little bit of gas.

                  * Start up the mower, and let it run out of gas.

                  * Drain out the old warmed up oil.

                              - change out oil filter if there is one

                  * While waiting for oil to drain clean off the top of the mower

                  * Fill crank case with recommended oil.

                  * Tip mower (push type) on its side and remove blade (this gets new oil
                                distributed all through half the engine)

                  * Sharpen the blade and clean off underside of mower

                  * Tip the mower on its other side to reattach blade (distributing oil throughout the
                                 other half of the engine)

                  * If the Spark plug has not been changed in two years, now might be a good time                              to do this.

                             - #1 reason mowers don’t start in the spring is old gas left in the mower,                                                     varnishing up the carburetor

                             - #2 Old spark plugs.

             Tomorrow we’ll talk about the rest of the kids and their bedtime rituals.

             If you have any questions feel free to e-mail me at NiemeyerLandscaping@Gmail.com or post a comment on this Blog. Like us on Facebook.