If you have a lawn, and a lawnmower, especially a gas powered one, this is the time to winterize it. I think I’ll have done the last mow of this year by days end, and the trick is to get that mower winterized after the last mow and have it ready for spring.<\/p>\n
There are a lot of different techniques for different mowers, but the basics are all the same: Fuel, air, oil, clean.<\/p>\n
Each mower (or any piece of yard equipment) has it’s own reccomended practices, but if you’ve lost your manul, you can’t be hurt by doing it this way.<\/p>\n
Clean: the mower in general, the cooling fins, the deck. Partner waxes his deck at the end of each season so the grass doesn’t stick. I haven’t had a mower capable of being waxed for thirty years, but if you’re as anal and as meticulous as partner is, it seems to work fine for him<\/p>\n
Clean: the spark plug, put a little squirt of oil in the spark plug hole and turn the motor, then put the new, cleaned spark plug back in the hole and tighten to spec.<\/p>\n
Air: Change the air filter and make sure there aren’t wads of gunk stuck in the air filter housing.<\/p>\n
Oil the moving parts (blade stop, controls, etc) and change the oil. <\/p>\n
Fuel is a source of some contention. If you have an older machine with a metal tank, you want to keep it full of fuel. If it’s newer and plastic, the conventional wisdom is to drain it. I’m of the “Full tank with fuel stabilizer” school of thought, and it has worked well for forty years, for me. best thig in any event, is to mix fuel with fuel stabilizer, and then run the engine, whether you drain or don’t drain, this will keep the last few drops in the carb from turning to varnish overwinter. <\/p>\n
In spring, if you keep the tank full, drain it into a can and put THAT fuel in your car. The fuel stabilizer makes the gas a bit harder to ignite after standing for so long, so fresh fuel in the spring is a must, and the little bit of fuel in your much larger vehicle tank will not affect it’s operation adversely. <\/p>\n
The same, of course, goes for your snowblower, assuming you have\/need one, only in opposite seasons. <\/p>\n
Just a public service announcement from a guy who hates to be fucking with stuff like this in the spring. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
If you have a lawn, and a lawnmower, especially a gas powered one, this is the time to winterize it. I think I’ll have done the last mow of this year by days end, and the trick is to get that mower winterized after the last mow and have it ready for spring. There are […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3946"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/neanderpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}