I took the slider out to the porch (the one over by the McDonald’s side) because it kept coming off the rollers. Doing it myself turned out to be a big mistake as I had to walk it out from the frame little by little. Unfortunately the bottom was covered in grease and little metal fragments from gliding on the rail. I could not get the stains out with any of the half dozen rug cleaning products I tried. So Betsy decided it was time to get the downstairs, bedroom and porch rugs cleaned. We had to take everything off the porch so Betsy’s usual extremely neat kitchen ended up looking like this for almost a week.



The wonder was that Betsy did not get too torqued up by the chaos in the kitchen. The rug dried pretty quickly so we were able to return things to normal by Wednesday.
Meanwhile the porch was very echo-y.

The second wonder of note was that Art and I replaced the steering column on the Ariens. We had been getting increasing play in the steering over the past few years. We had taking the cowling off and looked at it in the fall but couldn’t see anything broken or missing. It was getting really bad so we took it all apart and somehow the solid metal steering column had gotten worn down so it no longer fit snugly in the bracket it goes into.

I will have to take a clearer shot of the old one so you can see the damage. It looks like it has been machined. It can see how something that spins at fairly high speed can get this kind of damage but not a steering column.
Any way we were able to install the new one in about 2 hours. We were packing everything up when we noticed that the speed control was not connected to the cable down to the engine. So we had to disassemble that assembly, cut back the sheath, bend a new hook into the wire and then put it all back together. Amazingly enough, we were successful and we have the Ariens back in service.