Rototiller madness!

I went to work and taught myself PADS, a new circuit-board layout program. It sucks. The first time I learned one of these, they sent me to a $4000 class for a week. At this point I can pretty much just learn it in two days of screwing around.

Work sucked.

I came home and started wrestling with the rototiller. It's older than I am. It might be older than my mother. It's a Craftsman, all welded together out of rusty angle-iron. Every year something different isn't working. Last year I couldn't get it to start and the pull-starter was misbehaving: it wasn't retracting correctly. So, given that there's no way I'll remember what I did, I'm going to write it down. Here.

Pull-starters are sort of sprague clutches: they turn one way and lock the other. That's controlled by a friction-driven dog that sticks out when the cord is pulled and retracts otherwise. The retract mechanism for the cord uses a big coil spring inside two nested cylinders. They *have* to be closed and flush against the housing face, so the cord tracks through the hole. The reason they don't is because the coil spring butt end goes through a slit in one of the cylinders, and the other cylinder hangs up on the butt end, so that needs to be bent flat. Otherwise the cylinder pack jams against the crankshaft and it won't ever retract right. You'll know it's put together correctly when the shoulder nut that holds the entire starter system together can be fully tightened without screwing up how everything works.
The coil spring gets really nasty. It needs to be cleaned and oiled every now and then. If it comes out of the casing it's going to basically explode all over everywhere. WATCH for this. When you go to rewind it do NOT try to coil it up in your hands and jam it back into the cylinder. It won't work. It will escape and damn near cut off your finger and you'll bleed everywhere. Wrap it back into the cylinder starting from the outside and winding towards the inside. Wear gloves next time, yo.