Lawn-mower repairs keep grass green in retirement

Originally published Saturday, November 8, 1997

By JON HAHN  
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER COLUMNIST

Any way you cut it, the more mowers there are in Auburn, the busier Ray Hardin will be in retirement.

Hardin, 76, is one of those Boeing retirees who can't sit still. The former preflight supervisor who used to work on huge aircraft engines now runs Bill's Repair, a lawn mower and small engine shop out on the far Lea Hill edge of Auburn.

"This has been one of the busiest seasons I can remember," said Hardin as he hunkered over one of the work benches in the red barn workshop behind his house on 132nd Avenue Southeast. "Normally, I'd be through for the season and we'd be getting ready to go to Arizona." The shop at 30720 132nd Ave. S.E. is open 8:30 to 5:30, Mondays through Saturdays. When Puget Sound winter rains come, Hardin shuts down and retreats to the Arizona sun until spring.

There's already a bit of a chill in the unheated shop as Hardin tears into a self-propelled mower that stopped propelling. The blade looks as though its owner has been cutting three-quarter-inch galvanized pipe and the bottom of the overturned housing has a bushel of caked-on rope, wire and oil-soaked grass mulch.

"This one's gonna take me a good six hours to get running, including the cleanup and tuneup and then check the drive mechanism and change the oil. Most only take about two hours or so, but I never turn down a job I'm pretty sure I can do, no matter how bad it looks."

And some of them look pretty bad, he concedes. "Most people already know when they come in that their mower's a goner," he said. "But they bring it to me to confirm their suspicions. I don't charge anything for an initial inspection." A dozen or so old mowers reside in a sort of lawn mower graveyard alongside the barn, a stockpile for old parts. But most can be put back into shape and sent home with new oil and sharpened and balanced blades.

A half-dozen newly repaired and serviced power mowers and motorized weed cutters are arranged on the barn floor near the overhead door, waiting for end-of-the-season customers. The small barn is a sort of organized clutter of work benches, chain falls, drill presses, parts bins, lathes and grinding machines and umpteen different mower parts. An office clock stuck on 7 minutes to 6 hangs on one wall over a bookshelf full of parts manuals.

This is the second-generation of the Bill's Repair Shop that formerly was on Division Street in downtown Auburn. Bill Worley, who sold the business to Hardin, still comes in periodically to help Hardin, mostly sharpening the old-fashioned reel-type lawn mowers.

There wasn't a whole lot out in this neck of the woods except Seattle International Speedway when Hardin and his wife, Helen, bought what he says was "nothing more than a 14-acre stump ranch." He built the little frame home on the other side of the driveway, now rented out, and the red barn for daughters' horses. "Things were so quiet out here that you looked out if you heard a car coming down the road. Now it's like another speedway out there," he said. When the state put in Route 18, it cut his property "about in half," with his home and barn on the north half.

For years, Hardin commuted to work at various Boeing facilities until he retired in 1969. "And I knew I didn't want to just sit around. I always wanted to work on small engines, so I went over to Highline (Community College) and took a small-engines course.

"I started taking in mowers, but kept running into problems. And whenever I had a problem, I'd end up down at Bill's shop, asking him how to handle this or that. It got so I was spending more time there than at home, so I asked him if I could work at the shop for six months, for no pay, just so's I could learn the work hands-on." The schooling was "probably a good thing," he said, "but nothing beats hands-on training. You really need both."

Bill Worley got sick shortly after that and sold the business to Hardin, who operated it for a while in town "until the rent got too high." And since his daughters no longer had horses, he cleared out the old barn and set up shop, including the "Bill's Repairs" sign on the road out front.

Ninety percent of the work is power mowers, Hardin said, nodding to the newly tuned and cleaned mowers. "Carburetors are usually the problem. People get a lot of water in their gas these days, and that clogs an engine something terrible. We have to take it (carburetor) apart and blow out the water and clogs."

The other common problem of homeowner/grass cutters is oil changing. "Some people just don't bother to change oil. And some never even check the oil level. That machine over there needs a whole new engine because it was run without oil and it froze up. I get maybe five or six a year like that." Some, on the other hand, are well-maintained. "I've had some come in that are 30, even 40 years old and still cutting grass." Prince that he is, Hardin got his wife a John Deereriding lawn mower, the Mercedes of riding mowers, so she can cut their grass while he works.

The lawn mower year starts in spring and gets downright heavy around Memorial Day, when Hardin's normal one- or two-day turnaround time for a mower repair can reach a week, 10 days or longer. "There are weeks in the spring and summer when there'll be 30 or 40 mowers parked out in front," he noted. But because he's got a boat and several grandchildren who like to water-ski, he just plain shuts the business in midsummer "for a week or so" and spends time on the water with the grandchildren . . . a long way from the green growing lawns of Auburn.

Jon Hahn is a staff columnist who writes three times a week in the P-I.