Rememberance of the Summer of Ven: Introducing Murdervan and Spoolbus

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One of the hallmarks of a relationship rebound is that you try to do all the things you couldn’t do before with your new one. That’s definitely true for me, as one of the principal reasons I decided to finally get out of the Boston area was due to the near impossibility of finding van-sized workspace. I got a taste of it last summer when I had Big Chuck’s Auto Body long enough to bang off the Vantruck resto, and it was why I was hell-bent on finding a place like the Robot Trap House that let me have a combined private work and storage space.

So what am I gonna do when going from single rented parking spots to an entire fenced in, forested yard that nobody can look at? Well, if the last post was any indication, collect horrible piles of machinery. I can assure you that Crabmower was far from the only thing I fetched this summer! With that, here’s a welcome to…

The Summer of Ven

Ven is the plural of van. Fight me.

The story begins really years back with the original purchase of Vantruck, which was mostly at the behest of someone I’d say is a “diesel bro” friend. I have a handful of said friends all over the country, who operate all sorts of old diesel trucks, vans, and the like while being software engineers, VR/AR enthusiasts, and roboticists. There’s something about these old, usually all-mechanical, diesel engines attached to overbuilt but maybe not well-built coachworks, that appeals to the technocratic futurist. Maybe being on the forefront of changing and evolving technology constantly makes one seek a foil in the antiquated but static. You can always push an update over the cloud, but once the crankshaft is forged, changing any aspects of its manifestation is really hard. Maybe that’s what draws me to buy “vintage” equipment, tools, and lawn mowers too – the yearly newest and shiniest offering from Jeff Bezos’ magic book of tricks will always be there if I need it, so I’m going to have some fun first and keep something time-tested around.

What I’m saying is, everybody (and I wholly agree, by the way) has been saying that Vantruck absolutely needs an International IDI 7.3 or its successor, the Powerstroke 7.3L diesel. Something of its bulging Kazakhstani child-bearing hips presentation just screams it must rattle like a old tractor and smell like warm coals. There’s no social media peanut gallery about it without a number of people wistfully encouraging swapping out the Malaise-era 460. And again, I completely agree. Alas, work of that degree I considered out of scope for the facilities I had available – I know plenty of people have done parking lot engine swaps, but I just didn’t feel like dealing with it, and at the time didn’t have a cohort of Car People friends who wanted to speed the process along.

Well now, with a place I can stash something for an indeterminate period of time, I decided it was high time to take people up on their word and begin learning the ecosystem. My goal was to find a Ford van of Vantruck’s same generation which was built with the 6.9L and 7.3L IDI engine, implying a year range of 1984 to 1991. While I could have just as easily picked up a later 4th-generation model or an old ambulance or something, I decided to constrain the search for the time being to just those years to get as 1-to-1 of a parts correspondence as possible. Worse case, I figured ,it’ll be a vantruck surrogate.

I say “just as easily”, but the reality is the diesel vans (and F-series trucks) command a premium over the average clapped out yard ornament conversion or work van. They’re popular with the bugout and overlanding crowd because the engine and powertrain is legendary for being nearly indestructible and extremely customizable. I casually checked my usual orbiting van cruft clouds – Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace all up along the east coast BAMA corridor whose transit times and approach paths I know well – for a good three or so months, interleaving with the build of Overhaul and intenstifying as the prospect of an April BattleBots filming became bleaker.

You’d generally find them in two states. First was immaculate or intricately upgraded, commanding prices of $5000 and up. Otherwise, it was sunken into the earth and had hosted several dozen generations of small mammals and local reptiles inside. Since I wasn’t absolutely dying to adopt another project, I was looking for specifically something which was “Ran When Parked” but seemed plausible to unpark rather quickly. Kind of like another sadvan, but much heavier. Two hits I found were snatched up before I even got a response. While my guiding principle of van collecting is “Rare doesn’t mean valuable”, it seems like there are still some local maxima of value I didn’t know about.

Well one day in mid May, I finally happened upon a listing just hours after it was posted.

Murdervan

 

Richmond is a drive, but nothing I haven’t done before in a day. Having ran as recently as the last winter was a good sign also. I chatted with the seller some to get a few more details, and with consultation from my Diesel Bro Council, decided to go for it the following weekend. I made an offer of $1000 and he accepted. I decided to name this thing Murdervan because it really gave off the ol’ serial killer van vibe, and the seller reminded me a little of Charles Manson. I completely accepted the potential fate of ending up as a trophy in a basement, and just asked my friends to keep an eye out if Vantruck gets listed in an ad next.

 

And so, here we are on the morning late afternoon of May 30th. I’m ready to set sail towards Richmond. I was planning on getting out at 8 in the morning and being in the vicinity in time to grab a hotel for the evening, but you how that goes with me. Instead, I left Atlanta around 4PM and took a rest stop nap from around 2am to 8am the next day, going directly to the burbs of Richmond after.

Nestled in a quaint park-like neighborhood was the seller’s smol house and yard, with this thing squarely in the middle. Well, at least it’s van shaped and there are no visible mantraps, and the driveway slope made it a pretty reasonable gravity-assist push load onto a trailer.

Overall, Murdervan checked out as described in the ad. The interior was pretty messy and barren, and the driver’s side floor had a giant rust hole in it, but nothing insurmountable. After all, if I got it “running”, I wasn’t in it for the chassis except as a parts donor. It would crank, but not fire up. My friends said as long as it wasn’t seized, it will run. Guess I’ll find out soon how true that is??!

Whatever the case might be, it was loading time!

I had questions about whether an extended wheelbase van (138″) would even fit on a U-Haul car trailer. The Internet seemed convinced that the deck length of a U-Haul car trailer was 12 foot even – 144″. This was going to be a dice roll, since after accommodating for wheel size, it might barely not  fit at all, and would hang over the end. I made a few contingency plans for this, and picked up two sets of chains and chain binders on the way at a Harbor Freight.

I had a local friend meet me there, so we had 3 people to help load. And believe me, we needed all three. These things are almost 6,000 pounds, by far the biggest catch I’ve tried bringing home. The “gravity feed” only got the front wheels onto the trailer, and various arrangements of come-alongs and Ass Force were used to pull the front wheels against the stop.

At that point, the rear wheel centers were still a good two inches or so on the wrong side of the edge. To improve this loading scenario, we deflated the front tires and pulled the come-along further to compress them.

 

The final alignment – just barely inboard. Those two chain binders were used to smash this thing down as tightly as possible, because utter hilarity would result otherwise!

And so, there you have it, Internet: A 138″ wheelbase Econoline Super Van will, with some effort, fit on a U-Haul auto transport. Do NOT let them see it. This is a 1999 Honda Civic.

I set out from Richmond after lunchtime with everyone to celebrate this feat. This trailer and van setup pulled quite well, I must say. With the combined load being about 8,000 pounds – therefore running around 14,000 gross weight –  I could certainly entertain the thought of Murdervan and trailer being a comically large RV trailer, which vantrucks evolved to pull in their natural habitat.

There were a couple of times it tried to wiggle, more from “Top heavy and jiggly van” than weight distribution issues from my observation. Vantruck’s dually rear axle kept it so damped out that I didn’t even feel it the first time. The only sign was “Why is everyone keeping far away….”, looking in the rear view mirror , and seeing the thing sway side to side a few inches at steady state.

This was a riot pulling into rest stops and gas stations (MANY, MANY GAS STATIONS). By my estimate, I was getting high sevens for fuel economy, and this was trying to keep it under 65mph.

I overnighted outside of Greenville, SC in a hotel room since I didn’t get worthwhile sleep the night before (or really the night before that…), so I decided to force power down before something memeful happened on my behalf. I rolled back to the #RobotTrapHouse the next morning. Here began the fun of trying to stuff Murdervan into the yard.

I first tried to reverse up the gentle slope that leads from the street/driveway to the yard entrance. However, even having bypassed/locked out the surge brake that all these trailers come with (which largely prevent reversing, as the brakes will apply), Vantruck was just digging four trenches into the grass. So instead I decided to just head straight in, gathering steam on the street and driveway, and deal with whatever happened next. The whole van train just barely makes the entry turn to avoid the….

Yeah, nope – there was some Dynamic Landscaping involved to get the trailer to not catch on the chain link fence edge. Remember, I don’t own this place (…yet…), so I don’t just get to rip out trees and fences as I feel like to improve van access. The through-paved rear access road comes after the closing.

 

Unloading Murdervan was super simple. Just point the trailer vaguely where I wanted to land, release the chains and straps, and reinflate the front tires.

After the unload, we spent a good half hour trying to squeeze Vantruck and trailer out, and realized that the van train was simply too long to back out the same way. This should have theoretically worked out, but trees are largely one-way clutches when it comes to driving through them – I almost pulled one of the front fender flares off trying to position the way I came in.  And so, we decided to swap trucks – my friend’s crew cab short bed truck was only a little shorter than Vantruck, but more importantly, it had more wheel cut and was not a dually, so it was narrower. Gentle massaging and a few retries later, we had the trailer backed out of the yard.

Lesson learned – don’t do that again, not with vantruck. Only after the fact did we go “Hmm, maybe Mikuvan could have been the yard shuttle…”

And here she sits in the initial dropoff location, featuring a cameo from one of the neighborhood cats. If you put a bowl of food and water out, cat instances will spawn from the cloud. If you present a new yard ornament, cats will sleep on top of it. I call them the “Cats-as-a-service”, and there are four regulars that come around.

I put the batteries on charge and began reading up on debug and bootup procedures. Much of Murdervan’s “build reports”, so to speak, are largely going to feature diving into the IDI ecosystem, checking through things, and making repairs to improve functionality – the same steps that Vantruck went through which I called “deshittification”.

The story only really begins here.

Spoolbus

Keep in mind, just because I got one van, doesn’t mean I’m going to stop browsing. I’m continually on the hunt, as even if I don’t get something for myself, someone else might be interested and I can assist with the poor life decision (There will be posts about this, too!).  And so, not two weeks after the Murdervan mission, this absolute piece shows up in the Algorithm™:

 

 

Okay, back up a little here. This was one of the ads that I didn’t even get to hear back from before someone snatched it up, all the way back in early April.  Between then and mid-June, it made its way to south Georgia, only about 3 hours away. The second listing is long gone, and only through some serendipitous use of the Save button by someone else were we even able to find this original listing again.

So why did it show back up? Did someone give up on it because it was just too horrible? Inquiring minds, mostly mine, wanted to know. The photos showed the aftermarket Banks turbocharger system hiding right under the dashboard (seriously? that’s where they decided to put it?) and the updated listing showed some more photos of the interior (stripped out and ratty) and under the hood.

Whatever, diesel or not, this was going to be a good one to add to the collection. Single rear wheel Centurion vantrucks were extremely rare themselves, and not only that, the OEM Centurion bed appeared to be whole and intact. Even Vantruck itself came with damaged fiberglass that had to be repaired (then replaced outright when it was rear-ended). And the 80s stripes!

I had only a few words with the new seller before just offering $1K again and pickup the same weekend. That’s my usual M.O. – if I think something’s worth getting, I’d wait until the middle of the week, throw in a not-that-lowball offer, and offer almost immediate turnaround. Most people who sell such decrepit piles just want them out of the way and don’t want to deal with hagglers and noncommitment. I just offer to make it disappear.

And so on another bright moist day in the middle of June, I’m driving an hour away from I-75 in the southerly extents of Warner Robins, on little two lane state roads. This thing had made it all the way to a placed called Abbeville, Georgia, where you passed the church and gas station on the corner and that was about it.

I have to say, this was the easiest load ever. It drove onto the tow dolly under its own ignition and power thereafter! It just couldn’t stop except for the parking brake. The seller indicated it might need a new master cylinder or repaired brake lines, and indeed, the pedal just goes to the floor. He just ran out of time and energy to deal with it after wanting to make the repairs, and was in the middle of selling a portion of his fourteen other trucks. I was offered a mid 1990s F-350 dumptruck on the spot for $500.

This time I went for the tow dolly, as the extended wheelbase on these things (158″ typically) was just too long for the car trailer, even with shoving. With the rear wheel on the ground, I just had to remove the driveshaft. But it seems like swishing a 4.10:1 gearset around in heavy oil adds immense drag the same, as my fuel economy making it back home was somehow even worse than towing Murdervan.

How often do you see this vantruck on vantruck towing action? HOW OFTEN?

 

Spoolbus was a very well contained one-day trip. I set out from the Atlanta area before lunchtime and was back around 9:30 PM, taking 3 hours to get there and 4 to get back, moving slower and hitting some traffic on the return.

And it even drove itself into the back yard! I had one hand on the steering wheel and another holding the parking brake release lever open, using my left foot to modulate the parking brake to not run my own garage down.

And suddenly, there were two.

Great, what a start to the summer. At the point in time of this picture, I’d already gotten Murdervan operational, so it was an excellent reference to compare and contrast the differences between the 1991 7.3 IDI and the 1984 6.9 with aftermarket shenanigans.

Based on talking to the sellers and getting vehicle history reports, I know that Murdervan was a company shuttle in western North Carolina doing forestry work for most of its 197,000 miles (!) before being sold to a private buyer in Virginia, who I actually linked up with on Instagram and Facebook. That seller sold it eastward to Richmond, where Not Quite Charles Manson took possession for a while before I ended up with it.

Spoolbus has a murkier history, but had one owner all the way up to 2005 when the last title action was taken around Columbia, SC. Based on talking to the original ad’s lister (not the guy I picked it up from in Georgia), the previous owner to him was the original owner, and it was used to deliver RVs and boats all up and down the southeastern seacoast, mostly centered in Charleston. That explains the hefty amount of rust on the body, completely uncharacteristic of southern vehicles. Vantruck itself was a west coast surfmobile/beach van and it had plenty of cab rust the same, though in both cases, the frames are pretty immaculate.

For the next couple of weeks, you can expect lots of posts about me being a makeshift diesel mechanic! Spoolbus is going to be the “build target” for the next round of improvements and restoration, as I want to return its electric lemony goodness to its former glory and have a single-wheel Centurion example. This is likely going to be a 2021 onwards project, with the rest of 2020 being casual mechanicking to deshittify the absolutely terrific aftermarket wiring and other systems.

I call this the Three Econoline Problem.

 

Thank You for Calling Big Chuck’s Lawn and Landscaping: Introducing Crabmower

chorl7 Comments

This website is now a van.

In my circles, “being a van” refers to something which needs constant upkeep and repair before it can be useful. If you have a certain arcane procedure and checklist for booting something up, or a very prescribed set of operating conditions and limitations, then you have a van. Vans do not have to be van shaped to be considered vans, as the state of van is a radically inclusive and individualistic phenomenon. Mikuvan was, for the longest time, a van. It’s still a van, just less in the van sense. Get it!?

Running on an installation of WordPress now over 10 years old that’s no longer supported and full of security holes, with plenty of my custom-hacked PHP and CSS dating back to 2007, and all plopped on a hosting which Godaddy has called me plenty of times about calling it “Legacy”…. this website is a van. You in fact might have noticed it, in fact. There’s a little annoying spambot that occasionally hijacks and redirects search engine referrals and tries to sell you dick pills on my behalf. I pry this thing off the PHP directories every once in a while, like an advertisement-laden barnacle. It doesn’t affect the site within itself, only search results like from Google hits and the like. Well it turns out everyone just searches ‘charles guan site’ because this site’s name is impossible to spell for normal people!

Anyways, that Van Factor along with my summer mechanical misappropriations is why this site’s been so dead lately. There is plenty of content, I just don’t want to keep updating it and maintaining it, so I walked for a while. But now I figure I’d get in a few more posts, download the database and file structure, then nuke the whole thing from orbit and try again with a modern CMS or something. We’ll see when I actually devote the mental energy and time to Internets again.

I’ve said it often before in various contexts including here, that modern social media just makes it too easy to share stuff to a big audience and so the extra effort of maintaining a static website presence is less rewarding. I’m no social butterfly, but Instagram has certainly made it easy to puke photos onto the Internet. As I am mainly a visual storyteller anyhow, I adopted it more in earnest this year. For the latest candid and disorganized photos, look here at my Instagram page @fakecharlesguan first. This is a deliberate choice in username, as if I get famous enough and someone tries to make a fake me page, they will have to necessarily use @officialcharlesguan or something similar, adding to the confusion and hilarity. Be prepared for many cats and electrical atrocities.

Obviously, a lot of the new not-seen-here content will eventually make it here in a static format, such as the series of posts I want to write called The Summer of Ven. You can guess what that might entail.

Anyways, let’s get back to the #RobotTrapHouse. You know what it has? A lawn. You know what lawns do? They grow, and while I’m technically under no obligation to perform lawn maintenance in my lease, I also don’t want to That Guy too much just yet for the neighborhood. For a few months into the spring and summer, I decided that I was done trimming grass in high school, so I paid for it As A Service. Then I decided that the yard isn’t really that big and maybe this was a chance to get another horrible machine of some kind to tear apart or improve.

I actually was looking first at a current-gen brushless self-propelled electric lawn mower such as the Harbor Freight Special. It was more about the curiosity of what kind of value engineering went into such a power system, in the same vein as my dissections of serial killer equipment. It got to the point where I actually went to Harbor Freight to inspect the goods in person, drawing up plans for using the dual rear drive wheels to make it autonomous. I kept an eye on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist for used ones – that was my first mistake – but it seems like they’re a bit too new to begin circulating on the informal economy cruft cloud.

Then one morning, I saw this thing.

 

What in the hell? It looked like a walk-behind commercial mower at first, but other photos showed it had a seat. What the absolute, interminable fuck is with that drive belt? The “My granpappy left it to me” quip in the ad made me wonder if it was homemade by Granpappy himself, or so far cut up from a production model that it’s basically the same.

I obviously had to offer the insultingly low price of $200 – figuring it’ll get declined but I was out to spend $200 or so on something anyway. That was my second mistake.

Well, it’s the following Saturday, and my third and final mistake was complete: Renting the trailer.

 

Luckily, this thing was only about 15 minutes away by van. It was exactly as described: Covered in rat shit and lawn detritus, all tires flat, and with random parts everywhere. After looking it over, I decided… why the hell not. Worst case I attach two Overhaul motors to the drive wheels and make it remote controlled.

Vantruck carries my “yard wreckage recovery kit”, so I just busted out the tire filler and proceeded to fill up the drive tires. Sadly, the steer tire was completely destroyed and would not fill.

So the seller towed it out of the building with his truck and helped shove it into mine, which was a fair ways away since I couldn’t get right up to it and turn around.

 

By the time this process was done, the rear wheel was definitely quite sad. Look at those rear forks and bracket it rests against – that’s solid 1/2″ and 5/8″ thick steel bar!

We’ve returned to the #RobotTrapHouse now with my absolutely HOA-terrorizing long unkempt grass. I decided that since it was still bright and early (for me… so, 3PM) and with the summer yielding plenty of sunlight, I’d try to get it running and drive it into the yard for more work and repair later.

(Note: This area doesn’t have an HOA, but again, everyone else does keep their yard nice and clean so I might as well give a superficial attempt)

First order of business was taking the rear wheel off. A nearby tire shop had a selection of lawn tires also, so I asked for them to put on a replacement. I’m used to non-automotive tires being split rims that use inner tubes, but it seems this thing is Pro enough that it actually uses one-piece tubeless wheels, so I couldn’t pry it off myself. Fancy!

As I worked on it, of course, I started doing research on what on earth it was I actually bought. Why didn’t I do this beforehand, you say… well what’s the fun in that?

So this thing is a Yazoo Master Mower, built by the Yazoo Manufacturing company out of Mississippi. Yazoo has now reached semantic saturation for you and just sounds funny. Yazoo.

It seems to be good ol’ redneck ingenuity sent straight to production, which was exciting. The company appears to have made some legendarily durable/serviceable commercial and consumer lawn equipment into the 80s when they merged with another company, and the bloodline today lives on in Husqvarna lawn and garden equipment.

Judging by how many “THIS PRODUCT IS UNSAFE” stickers are on it, it’s right in line with my interests! This is how all products should be made, by the way. The goobermint can set safety bars, but you should be able to voluntarily not abide by them. If I then buy your brightly labeled unsafe product because I think it’s cool, then that’s kind of on me, no?

 

Look at this wild drive belt. Just look at it.

The major innovative feature of this transmission, apparently fully built in-house, is that it contains a set of double clutches with reversing gears. One lever will flip it between forward and reverse not by crashing gears together, but just by engaging the clutches. The rear wheel steered like a forklift and allowed a near-zero turn radius. I know nothing about the lawn care industry at all, mind you, just that this is dope. The only thing they couldn’t do with this transaxle, it seems, was make it take a sideways input shaft. Instead, we have Pretzelbelt here.

Here’s why I like maintaining a real website. I discovered someone else has a website about servicing and modifying this incredibly obscure, niche piece of equipment that I bought without much planning. I get e-mails all the time from people who bought some obscure, niche piece of equipment and then it turns out I dissected it or fixed it up on this very website, whether that’s random scooter motors or the Ryobi chainsaw or even up to the giant Surplus Center gearmotor. I have apparently sold people on getting their own piles of Chinesium because they read about it on this website.  At least one person got a Mitsubishi van project because of all the posts about Mikuvan showing its ins and outs.

This is the kind of thing that is very hard to do with contemporary social media which is very focused on The Now and not The Later. Even Youtube videos are hard to search through since you have to remember what video title contained what content, at what time, and if the user account got hard-canceled by Twitter or not.

Interestingly enough, while looking it over harder, I found a very faded decal from a local lawn equipment service company. They’re not far away, and are still in business. It was very tempting to tow the thing right then up to their door and make it their problem again.


It was getting late in the day now, and I couldn’t get the thing to really stay running. It would happily run if I fed it a steady trip of starting fluid (ether), and did independently run once for a short time. It seemed like it was having fueling issues – fuel was getting to the (oh no) carburetor, but  seemingly not making it out. I figured it was just full of grunge from sitting in Granpappy’s shop forever.

Either way, it was getting later in the day now and I had to return the trailer, and I hate carburetors. I decided to just drop it off in the covered carport for later perusal.

Off the trailer it goes! I just pushed it to the edge of the ramp and let gravity do the heavy dropping. There was enough drag with it in gear and with all of the small idler wheels that it took some more pushing to even get it all the way off the ramp.

This is a carburetor. I hate it.

I was about to see if anyone made retrofit fuel injection systems for tiny engines as I took it apart. Anyways, fuel comes in the top left hose, some magic unicorn thing happens, and it exits in the airflow stream of the intake. The big lever on the horizontal runner is the manual choke, and the little stepped lever behind and under the whole assembly is the engine speed governor, which I learned pulls against your speed setting cable as the engine speeds up and therefore closes the throttle slightly to keep the engine speed steady. The uppermost twirly-gig with the adjustment screw is actually the throttle flap itself.

I began removing screws and separating the components. I couldn’t blow through the fuel inlet, so something’s just not passing…. gas

It took a while of friend consulting and fiddling for me to figure out what was going on. For one reason or another, the carburetor float (the brass soldered donut, which is hollow) and the needle valve it actuates was either out of position, incorrectly reassembled by someone, or was bent out of shape, because in what should have been a fully empty position it was barely letting me blow through the needle valve. Only if I let it hang down to a physically impossible position if assembled was it freely flowing.

Obviously this is going to mean almost no fuel enters the float bowl. I otherwise couldn’t find any “gunk” from it sitting.

I had to bend down the Lever of Needle Valve Actuation a fair bit to achieve a state where it would admit fuel in a physically plausible location.

 

Well it’s all put back together now, everything’s lubed up and resealed and freely working, so let’s just turn the key and see what happens.

And there we have it. I moved the vans far out of the way so I could practice driving a bit. This thing is weird. First, I’m not used to driving a lawn mower/tractor where you set a speed and aren’t really manipulating the throttle all the time. You really do drive it with the forward/reverse clutch lever, and it will reverse hard enough to throw me off the seat. What else throws you off the seat? Doing a hard zero point turn by swinging the rear-steer all the way! Everything you do seems to be ejecting yourself. No wonder they said it’s unsafe!

But fun? Very.

Now with it running and driving, it was time to make some other facility improvements before seeing if it’s good at its One Job.

First of all, like every other thing I’ve bought nth-hand, the wiring is atrocious. I repaired the positive side by cleaning up a lot of the corroded terminals and lugs, and ran a new ground wire to the battery because the existing one was just completely hopeless. It started far more enthusiastically afterwards. There’s not much wiring on this thing save for the starter/dynamo circuit and the ignition circuit.

 

The deck seemed to run fine, so I decided to just untangle and clean it out. While doing so, I pulled out this old ‘murican flag, covered in plant grunge and reeking of rat urine.

Guys. It emitted an American flag at me.

This is how I’m making America great again.

Notice the deck is lifted up by a jack here. I elevated it further with a chunk of 4×4 wood (leftover from workbench construction) so I could get under and inspect the blades and spindles. I couldn’t back off the spindle nuts to put new blades on, so for now, I did an in-place sharpen using an angle grinder.

The two large springs in the front counterbalance the deck and allow you to use a lever on the side to raise it slightly. With one spring broken, lifting the deck was kind of hopeless at my scale of force input. I’m sure a burly 300 pound gardener could do it just fine still, but I ordered replacement springs from McMaster the day before. They’re a bit weaker than needed, since it still takes some serious lunging effort to throw the lever, but at least now it’s plausible.

…and its first cut, one week after the purchase.

Okay, I’m not even. Even what? I dunno. Not mad, not glad, not sad, just d a d.

It’s been clean over a decade since I’ve cut any kind of grass, and I must say this …. device made very short work of it. And this was with crudely angle-ground blades in a position I could barely see what I was grinding!

It was hard to track straight since the forklift wheel had a lot of slop in it. relative to the steering wheel, even after I tightened the connecting #40 chain between them beforehand. Inspection revealed either a mostly stripped keyway or broken weld, so I’ll have to take it apart some day and bang it back together. Once I got going pointed in a direction, it was fine, but the corrections needed every U-turn needed getting used to. The top speed isn’t much more than a brisk walk, which is just fine by me, as I am not yet trying to race someone else’s lawn mower.

So afterwards, I gave it a good wash and blasted all the remaining grass grunge off the rider deck. I think I’m going to get a racing seat for this thing, as it absolutely needs bolstering. I’m not sure if you were supposed to anchor yourself from being obese or throw a ratchet strap on yourself or what, but the hardest part by far was just staying on the damn thing.

As a finishing touch, I was informed by a friend who used to be an actual lawn professional that the two mysterious forks in the front were for a roller to intercept obstacles. Not knowing what model roller would fit on this thing, I decided one round plastic thing was the same as any other and just 3D printed one in approximately the size and shape needed. The ridges aren’t for anything special, just adding more radial stiffness without having to make the thing solid.

And that’s it. With minimal fuss, crab-mower has done the lawn every 2 weeks. With fall and winter now approaching, I’ll probably lube and tune everything and tuck it away fairly soon. It was an interesting little distraction, a week-long dive into yet another obsolete technology. This and much more will come soon in the Summer of Ven post series!