Once more with aggression

Right. This is what happened with the mower (and sorry, I forgot to say yesterday that it’s a half-size tractor, not a push mower). First I fixed it. Which only took... oh? ... three bloody hours! Tears, fury, swearing - it had it all. I won’t tell you the name of the mower:



but the designers had thoughtfully placed a sharp-edged thing right where it’s necessary to rest your wrist as you simultaneously:
a) hold up the universal joint (heavy, solid metal),
b) twist it around to find the correct fit with the bit it’s supposed to slide onto, and
c) push it forward to test the connection.

After trial and error (and I say again, three bloody hours...) eventually it worked, giving me the opportunity (sadly limited due to the designers’ placement of obstacles) to hit the joint home with a hammer. Ya-hah! Success. A quick bit of lunch and off to a few hours mowing.

Then it started again: the tapping at the foot pedal, the thwacking noise under the deck... Driving back to the house, the very part I had just reconnected disconnected itself, not only from the connection but also from the post it usually surrounds, tore through the rubber cover, and flew out onto the grass:



At first I thought the post had broken off, but after a cursory examination there doesn’t seem to be anything broken. What can I say without swearing?


The evil underworld.