Guest Post: Matt and His Mower

Matt bought a junked commercial mower and fixed it up. He's handy with metal and mechanical stuff. Here's what he has to say about himself and his project:

I grew up on a farm in southern Illinois - not the big farms in the Mississippi River bottoms or the huge farms of central Illinois. My family has a small 160 acre farm that you need a full time job to support. My dad worked as a union heavy equipment operator and mechanic. When his work was good my sisters and brother did the farming after school. Being the youngest, I was too little to help much.

When work was slow (like it was through most of the 1980's) Dad repaired other farmers' equipment. I can remember there always being something in Dad's shop - a tractor, combine, anything that was too old to get parts for or the farmer couldn't afford to fix. Sometimes Dad traded his labor for the farmer's livestock. Anyway, the point is I was always watching him tear apart junk equipment and put it back together again in working order. I can remember taking apart Stompers, those little AA battery powered 4x4 trucks, and taking the motors out of one that worked and putting it in one that didn't. If it didn't fit I'd take my knife and cut and modify it until it did. That was in the 3rd grade.

All of this brings me to my current project. About a year ago the company I work for was getting rid of a bunch of old equipment that was either a safety hazard or was not worth sinking the money into fixing. In this pile of equipment was a mower that had seen better days. The mower is a 2004 Ferris DD dual drive walkbehind commercial mower. It had been mistreated by several years and several different people as part of a fleet of mowing equipment. It was basically treated like a rental car. We all know how we treat rental cars! It had been serviced regularly so the core components (engine, hydraulic pumps, and wheel motors) were good, but everything else was in bad shape. The deck was pretty bad because it takes the brunt of all the use and abuse. Knowing that a new mower like this costs around $5500, I thought that I could refurbish it for much less and have a mower that would last for many, many years. I bought the mower for $200.

The first task was the mower deck, It required fabricating a new section on the left side. it was worn down from jumping concrete curbs, hitting fences, and banging off of anything that had to mowed around. My dad cut out and welded in a new section of the deck, it was heated up and bent around to factory angles and he added in extra protection in the form of a 1/2" x 2" steel skid where the heavy wear occurs. It looks like it just came from the factory. You have to look under it to tell that anything had been rebuilt. I did the light welding. The grass shield that it had on it was metal and was bent so badly that I threw it away and decided to make one from scratch. I decided to pattern it off of the new style grass shield from a 2009 mower which is made from thick rubber instead of metal. I knew I could make the metal parts and thought I would just buy the rubber part of the shield. That was until I learned that the rubber part alone was $125 - not in the budget. What I did learn is that mud flaps from a semi-truck are made from the same rubber and can be cut and molded for about $7. Problem solved.

The problem with growing up on a farm with welders, cutting torches and enough tools to take apart just about anything is that when you move out you no longer have access to them. I've lost track of how many times I've started to do something and then realized that a 20 minute job in Dad's shop is now a 8 hour exercise in futility. Unless I wanted to spend 4 hours driving every weekend I had to find a way to cut and weld a little closer to home. Enter my friend Brandon. He lives less than five minutes away and was gracious enough to let me use his welder and shop. Problem #2 solved.

With access to a welder and some tips on sheet metal from various cable shows I was able to fix rips in the sheet metal for the belt covers and fab up the metal parts to the grass shield. Some things could not be repaired and had to be replaced such as the front tires, bearings and lots and lots of bolts. Those were my biggest expense. While disassembling the mower many of the bolts were rusty to the point of almost not being a bolt any more. So I replaced anything that would come in contact with grass or possibly make it hard to take apart again with stainless steel bolts. I know that this is overkill. The 1/2"x 2" steel skid was overkill. BUT the problems it had when I bought it will never be problems again. Once the machine was all apart the rest of the project was fairly straight forward. Cleaning out grease, sanding down rust, fixing hydraulic leaks that were "fixed" before by adding more fluid.

When it came time to primer and paint I wanted to get the exact color of the original machine. That was until I learned that it was almost $20 for a rattle can of factory paint. Again farm knowledge to the rescue! I thought that Ferris mower red and Case-International tractor red were pretty close. I sprayed the first coat on and it was a almost perfect match. At $3.75 a can it WAS a perfect match. All the plastic pieces were painted black with paint that actually etches to the plastic. For everyone with Little Tykes play stuff that has faded I highly recommend it.

The only real setbacks came in the last week. I had the plastic pieces painted early on and had them sitting on shelves in the garage. At some point the fuel tank fell off the shelf and landed on the engine and punctured a hole right in the middle of it. A new tank is about $90 so I went to AutoZone praying that they had something to help me. Salvation came in a little tube for under $3. After patching the hole I was so excited to get the project done that I started assembling right away. I connected the deck to the mower frame. (The deck had been done and sat all winter in the garage - sorry Jen.)

The next night Brandon helped me set the cleaned engine back on the frame and attach the rest of the parts. I put in gas and after about six pulls it roared to life. I cut the yard that evening and put it away proud of how everything fell perfectly into place. Until the next morning. I got up and walked into the utility room and noticed a gasoline smell. I grabbed a flashlight and went straight out the door to the garage. The valve at the bottom of the tank where the fuel line connects was slowly dripping gas all over the freshly painted frame. The paint didn't have any time to cure and was bubbling and peeling. My stomach felt like it had rocks in it. I went to work and put it out of my head until I could work on it that afternoon. Upon further inspection in the daylight the damage was only to a small area and can easily be fixed. My biggest fear was that the patch was leaking but it was dry as a bone. It seems the rubber O-ring in the gas tank had been dry for so long it allowed gas to pass by until the gas swelled it. Not so bad considering its previous state. I still have a little bit to repaint but the mower runs great and cuts awesome.

So, that's it for my guest post. I hope I haven't bored anyone, I know I enjoyed working on the mower and I think its given me enough confidence to get one step closer to my "Blue Baby" - a 1968 Cobra 427S/C kit car!

Great. I'm never going to have room for my car in the garage! If the mower took almost a year, how long will the Cobra take?

Edited to add a link to the special spray paint for plastic, Krylon Fusion.