Since the very beginning of the mowing season my mower has been giving me troubles. It had been running under powered to the point that I couldn’t go at full speed. In fact, if I was running the blades and tried going up hill it would nearly stall out. Our lawn isn’t small to begin with and with the machine running so slowly it was taking me around 3 hours to cut the whole thing.
After talking to Dad and a few other folks and checking the internet, I think the general consensus was that using bad fuel had clogged the carburetor up and it needed cleaning. Although another possibility was that the fuel line was partially clogged. I intended to take the machine down the a repair person who lives in town but just never got around to it. Between work, family time, business research time, and mowing the lawn very, very, very, slowly there isn’t much time left over.
It turns out that, for once, not getting around to doing something actually worked in my favor. On Sunday while mowing I looked behind me and found that the spark plug cap had completely fallen off. I didn’t think they would even run without that in place, but apparently it does. I reached down and shoved in back into place and, with a puff of white smoke, suddenly the engine was running at full power again!
I got to finish the rest of the yard on full speed and it was great! So, I ignored the problem and it went away… Okay, maybe I learned the wrong lesson on this one…
Hard Learning 