I have a nice Craftsman lawn mower. I like my lawn mower. I have no desire to get another lawn mower. And yet, I got another lawn mower. Jen bought a cordless string trimmer from someone she knows and they offered to throw in their mower for free, so why not?, we took it home.

I began mowing the lawn this weekend, and at one point I stopped to adjust the deck height on one side. When I tried to restart the engine, the pull cord snapped. Well, I couldn’t very well leave the lawn half-mowed, so I figured I’d try the “new” one. It started, which gave it an immediate advantage over the other.

After about two laps around the yard and listening to every single moving part squeak, rattle, or tick, and given the number of knobs and levers on the thing, I named it Max, as in “Mad Max”. If the bad guy from “The Road Warrior” had a wife, and she made him mow the lawn, he would have built something like this.

I guessed that it had to be either the cheapest, junkiest mower I’d ever seen, or the nicest I’d ever been around, for two reasons:

  1. It was monstrously heavy. It was self-propelled for the same reason as a Cadillac Escalade: if it wasn’t, it would be pretty useless.
  2. It had no safety equipment whatsoever. I don’t know how many times I got nailed by flying debris that shot out from the back of it.

And yet, it ran and did a pretty nice job. With any luck I’ll be able to fix the regular mower and use it next weekend, but if not, it’s nice knowing that the other hunk of snarling, deadly iron is available.