DIY again

Our £100 electric lawnmower from Bosch conked out this afternoon, maybe four years after we bought it.

Changed the fuse and it sprang into life, but along the way spotted a nasty gash in the cable about a yard out of the black box snapped (after a fashion) left, a black box which in life is attached to the underside of the middle of the handlebars. A gash through which a small amount of live copper wire was visible through a scrape in its brown cover, although the blue neutral line looked untouched.

Not very happy about this, so out with the toolbox - to find, rather to my surprise, that I could remove the black cowling to reveal the inner black assembly, itself removable and from which I could take the cover, maybe half an inch square and a millimetre thick, revealing the four connectors, just about visible in the middle of the snap. An assembly which functioned as a switch, making the connection when the blue plunger was pushed in, the blue plunger being pushed by the red plunger accessible to the user when it was all put back together again. No idea what the little yellow box does, apart from bridging across the two motor side wires.

There were four small holes into which to shove the four lots of bared wire, held in place by what looked like a small spring clip. But a spring clip which turned out not to be very springy, after I had levered it up to remove the old wire, and I had to fold the new wire around it to hold it in place. Not the positive connection one gets with the small brass screws to be found inside 13 amp plugs at all.

But on the second attempt, it all held together long enough for me to put it all back together again. Mow of front lawn now completed.

Not very happy about it all though, and given our rather clumsy arrangements for cut-out, the time seems ripe for the move to cordless. So now to the fretful business of shopping around, with some kind of Bosch cordless for about £350 being currently in view. Easy enough to buy one from Amazon, unseen, but where can we go to actually see one? Are there still shops which carry such things? BH is on the case.

PS: concrete by Mr. Kelly, now retired to a flat overlooking a golf course in Barbados.