It was deja vu. The bolt on the right front lawn mower wheel broke about three weeks ago. This morning after I made a half dozen passes, the bolt on the left front wheel broke. Same kind of bolt. Since it is Memorial Day Weekend Sunday, the Toro shop was closed.
At first I tried using three wheels to mow but that just tore up part of the lawn. Then I found a bolt that would fit the wheel part and put that on and then used duct tape to keep the wheel steady. An engineer would laugh at my temporary fix but it did get four bags of grass off the lawn. I told Neighbor Dave, the retired engineer, about it and he just shook his head.
I've only had that lawn mower a little over twenty years. They just don't make them as they used to. Back in my youth and lawn mowing entrepreneurship days, we used a two-wheel push-it mower. Now that was a man's mower and environmentally as green as it gets. A little oil and no gas and a young man was set for the duration of his lawn business which usually consisted of mowing lawns for one's own family or widows which wasn't exactly a high paying clientele but those were the good old days. When the boy got old enough, he could sell it to a younger sibling or the neighbor kid. It was free enterprise at its height.