I had, until recently, a complete set of spanners. In this house, that’s not normal. That’s something you maintain by habit, mild suspicion, and occasionally checking the garage before anyone leaves the premises. Two fully grown sons have a way of redistributing tools without quite admitting to it, yet somehow the set had held together.
Then the mower got involved.
It wouldn’t start, so I did what you do when you’re in a hurry and slightly irritated and went straight past “check the terminals” to “remove the battery”. Out came the tools, including the 8mm, which, after the 10mm, is the most useful spanner when you’re working on lawnmowers and, as it happens, my second son’s motorbikes. In other words, exactly the one you don’t want going missing.
Two minutes later the battery was out, sitting on the grass next to the mower, and the problem was obvious. Not dead, not tired, just a bit of crud on the terminals. The sort of thing that would have taken thirty seconds if I’d bothered to look first.
Which is when the 8mm slipped.
A small tick, then nothing. Not the clatter you hope for, but that soft absence of sound that tells you it’s gone somewhere awkward. Not dropped so much as absorbed. Somewhere in the mower there was now an 8mm spanner that no longer belonged to me.
The search started sensibly. Look underneath, have a proper look underneath, then start checking places that don’t really make sense but feel like they might. When that got me nowhere, I started the mower and drove it up and down the roughest bits of the garden in the fading light, as if it might shake itself loose out of embarrassment.
It didn’t.
At that point it stopped being a search and became an activity. The sort of thing you carry on doing because you’ve already committed to it and stopping would mean admitting it isn’t working. So, since I was already there, I got the jet washer out.
That’s when things went sideways.
What came off wasn’t just dirt, it was layers. Old grass, damp clippings, general agricultural residue, all packed in as if the mower had been quietly composting itself. As it cleared, the machine started to look less like something I owned and more like something I’d inherited.
Then the rust showed up properly, and with it a hole. Not a small one you can pretend not to see, but a proper hole in the footplate, the sort that makes you stop and think, “that wasn’t there yesterday”, even though it obviously was.
By then it was getting dark, I was damp, and the mower was clean enough to be slightly worrying, so I left it. Battery cleaned, machine running, spanner still missing, and a hole waiting patiently for the morning.
Morning brought two things. Better light, and a willingness to admit I was now looking for something I couldn’t see.
So I brought in Hayley, in her official role as Spanner Finder General. No torch, no crawling about, no driving machinery over rough ground. Fifteen minutes later she pointed to the mower deck and there it was, just sitting there, exactly where I’d been looking the night before, only apparently now visible.
At that point you just pick it up and say nothing.
With the spanner back where it belonged, attention turned to the hole, which had not improved overnight. Out came the grinder, then a bit of steel, which after some measuring, cutting and general persuasion became a doubling plate. Then the welder, and a job that had started with a battery that didn’t need changing turned into patching up the structure of a ride-on mower.
It all went back together, worked perfectly, and left me with a machine that is now solid in one very specific area and questionably original everywhere else.
Which brings me, inevitably, to the paint.
Because you can’t leave a fresh bit of welded steel painted with weld-through primer staring at you every time you get on. So now I’m looking for a can of Mountfield Red, not just any red, but something close enough that it doesn’t shout at you from three feet away. I’ll probably get it wrong, and it will always look slightly different in the sunlight.
The spanner set is complete again, for now. The mower works, mostly. The repaired footplate will probably outlast the rest of it. And somewhere in the house, I suspect, my sons have already noticed that the 8mm is back.
Stop press - Hyundai Bluish Red was near enough.
Not a perfect match, but passable.
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