Lawn mower in disguise

Ok, it's obvious that it's a lawnmower... but which, and which engine? took me a while to find it out!

It's a Snapper big six with a Briggs 6HP engine. Trouble is, they used a lot of different engines so which one is it? a label on the side says it's in the YBSXS.1901VC family... but couldn't find any information on those...

I decided to take the cover off the top and tried to find a serial number or plate... found a Briggs model/serial number on the front which was very hard to read (lots of rust, scratches and dirt). I needed to use a magnifying glass to read it and even then I had to guess/reconstruct several of the digits. Got there in the end though and found out that it was made on 14th December 1999 in assembly line 57!

Anyway, why did I want to know? it's not running very well at the mo... would run for a few minutes and then stop like it had run out of fuel. I won't bore you with the technical details but the whole mower needs some TLC and so thats what I'm doing. Going to order the spare parts tomorrow.

This is all part of my current "service and repair things" drive (been feeling like things have been breaking on me a lot lately and I decided it was time to spend a while to give some TLC and do general maintenance).

So far I have:

- Cleaned out the inside of my bench power supply and fixed the annoying grinding noise the fan had started making.

- Re-tapped and replaced a grub screw holding the handle on my milling machine (it kept falling out.. not good!). Re-calibrated it's table too and diagnosed the problem with the chuck... prognosis is good but will need minor chuck transplant surgery. I have already blipped the replacement control board for my mill!

- Sorted the problem with the LCD screen on my dSLR... it had gone funny around the edges :S but it was sorted after taking both of the batteries out for a while and then putting them back... weird.

- Car has started bleeping at me and saying "SERVICE NOW" so that is booked in for a service and has been washed. Inside still needs a good clean mind.


In fact, talking of my car... REALLY annoying thing happened yesterday morning... I had parked the car up the road slightly (there is no residents parking space directly outside our house) and it happened to be outside a house that some new people have moved into. There was loads of space behind me but they parked so that their bumper was pushing against mine... when I got back from work (only a few hours later as I had a short morning) they had moved their car all of six feet to where I was parked right outside of their house... I mean REALLY? grrrr! it's not their space! they are lucky they have parking right in front of their house... but were disgruntled at having to walk a few feet extra...

ok, sorry, rant over... but honestly!