Grass that looks ragged and whitish a day after you cut it, or gets torn up in clumps, is almost always a blunt blade tearing the lawn rather than slicing it, not a problem with the grass itself. Taking the…
A mower that starts hard, runs rough, blows grey-black smoke and drinks fuel is usually choking on a clogged air filter, not dying. The fix is a five-minute job: pull the plug lead, lift out the pleated filter, tap and…
Old oil turns thin, dirty and acidic over a season, and left to sit all winter it lets bare metal parts grind and corrode, which is how a cheap engine turns into a scrapped one. Draining and refilling takes about…
A pull cord that flops out slack and will not reel back in has almost always snapped inside the housing, which is a rope job, not a broken spring, and the fix costs a few pounds. A cord that has…
A mower that coughs, sputters and refuses to catch is very often starved of a proper spark, and the spark plug is the cheapest thing on the engine to check first. Pull the plug out, read the colour of its…
That Black Crust Under the Deck Is Doing Two Kinds of Damage at Once Tip your mower up at the end of the season and you will find the underside of the deck coated in a hard black crust of…
A mower that sat all season with petrol in it and now won’t start, needs a dozen pulls, or fires then dies a second later almost always has a carburettor gummed up by stale fuel, not a dead engine. A…
The idea that you should scalp the lawn low before winter is backwards; a taller cut protects the grass through the cold months. Cutting too short weakens the roots and lets in moss, weeds and disease, right when the lawn…
Nine times out of ten the bag stops filling once the airflow has failed, not once the collector is genuinely full. The usual causes are a caked deck, a blunt or worn blade, a clogged bag mesh and heavy autumn…
A mower that races and nearly stalls in a rhythm is almost always running lean: the governor keeps opening the throttle to chase a steady speed the fuel supply cannot hold. The cause is nearly always cheap and fixable at…
