Listening to Wisdom

The pull cord on our weed whacker broke a couple of weeks ago. Figuring that it would be a quick fix, I dismantled the beast far enough to find the hole for the string, rethreaded and reknotted the cord, then put it back together. I tried to pull-start it, only to discover that the cord had too much slack to make the engine turn over.

However, I graduated high school with a four-point-something GPA, made it through college, and finished a masters degree. I'm smart enough to fix a weed whacker, right? So I dismantled the beast even further and sought a solution to the problem. Examine, fiddle, and twist as I might, I couldn't get the thing to work. Nothing looked irreparably broken, but I couldn't figure out the fix.

I took the beast over to our local hardware store--which has a small machine shop attached--and asked them if they thought they could fix it.

"How much did you pay for it?" the guy behind the counter asked.

It's never good when that's the first question.

"A hundred bucks," I said.

He shook his head as if over a dog that would be better off put down. "By the time we get it open and find the problem, that'll be an hour of labor, which is going to be 52 dollars. And we will still have to order a part (or parts) to fix it."

Sigh. I carted the whacker back home to see when there might be money in the budget to purchase a new trimmer.

Enter my father-in-law. He's got a couple of decades more experience than I, and I know he's put in his time with motors and motorized equipment. Plus, he was over for a visit during my yard tool dilemma. We opened it up again, and he had a look. He thought what I was thinking: the spring that winds the cord would need to be replaced, but doing so would take professional equipment. I told him the cost-of-repair story, and he offered a bit of wisdom: since we've already got it apart, it will cost less for a repair guy to look it over, diagnose, and give a price. Brilliant.

I took the disassembled housing and cord pulley to another shop (closer to home), and asked one of their guys to have a look. He turned it over in his hands, gave the cord a yank or two, and said, "Yeah, getting this washer off is going to be hard; we'll have to order a new housing."

That's what we thought.

"But the spring looks OK," he said, fingering the red plastic like a troy-bilt rosary. "Wait just a second." He pulled out an awl, drew out some slack cord, and wound the cord another time around the pulley. He gave two pulls on the handle, and it snapped back to full tension.

"How'd you do that?" I asked, astonished. He showed me what he did (maybe I'll be able to do it again the next time I break the cord), and handed the piece back to me, fixed in less than three minutes by a lifetime of accumulated wisdom.

Let's hear it for the tinkerers whose hands can find the problem that a college degree can't analyze to solution. Let's hear it for wisdom, which saved me the cost of a new weed whacker when just brains couldn't. (Let's hear it for Oliver's shop down East Windsor Road.)

~ emrys