I spotted a Rover Baron mower at the tip yesterday. I'd been looking for a spring and governor attachment in good condition and this one fit the bill perfectly. So I paid the guy $20, took it home and started looking it over. My first thought was this mower looked too good to pull apart for spare parts. It had clearly done very little work and with a clean up it would almost look brand new. It looked like it would go.
Second I tested for spark and found plenty. Took the old plug out and put in a new one. Checked the oil, which was full but VERY dirty. I'm sure it still had the same oil in it since the time it was purchased.
Looked underneath and pulled the equivalent of a bail of dried straw and grass from under the deck and around the blade disk. The blades very worn and one broken. The grass must have been very wet and someone had just left it dry under there, so it had turned into a caked-on mass. No way this mower would have ever started until all that packed grass was scraped out from underneath.
I put some fuel in and gave it one pull and away it went. Not smoking, purring away like new. Idles well, and the throttle picks up well.
I am going to take the engine off and give it a good clean. Got the pressure hose to the base and it came up like new. Snorkel was the only thing broken, so I fitted a new one. I might have to buy a new air filter. Cleaned out the fuel tank and it had lots of grass and dirt in it. I will have to flush out the oil a couple times.
But I am really amazed to find a mower in such good condition, just suffering from obvious neglect. Some people really make me wonder. Are they too damn lazy to bend down and clean out the grass from underneath? Don't they care about changing the oil or checking the plug every now and then? It almost seems to me that someone has really pushed this mower through some extremely high grass in wet weather to the point that they have completely choked and clogged the base and the mower has stalled. Then they couldn't turn the mower over so dumped it. They've probably gone out and bought a new one and sent this perfectly good mower to the tip when all it needed was a bit of basic maintenance. LOL!
The sad thing is they probably bought one of the new Chinese mowers. I am already seeing LOTS of SANLI mowers in the recycling store at the tip, which obviously says something. They still look new, but in most cases when I've tried them, they won't go. I'm not sure if the electronics are no good on them or what the story is, but they seem very prone to failure after only a short while. They are not like the robust and usually reliable old Rover with their Briggs and Stratton motors!!
