Check off another box on the Man List.

This is a carburetor.  Specifically, the carburetor on a 5 hp Briggs and Stratton engine on a wood chipper.  It is another check mark in the Man List.  The Man List is a list of things all men should do before they pass away.  Different from a Bucket List, for not everything on a Man List is pleasant (changing dirty diapers, for instance). 

The story starts this spring when I finally called a lumberjack out to trim some branches that were growing on my roof.  After he was done, I had 6 foot piles of branches on each side of the house. 

I decided that I would rent a chipper to make some mulch but when I looked into it, they were like $400 per day for the really big ones, and they didn't rent out little ones.  For that price, I could buy a new one.  But the last thing I need is another thing in the garage, so I figured I'd pick one up on Craigslist and sell it when I was done.  Sure enough, I found one for $120 just south of me so I went and picked it up.

The chipper had been sitting in the gentelman's shed for about 5 years and it didn't have any gas in it so I couldn't test it out.  Sure enough, it didn't run when I got it home, so I figured I'd use YouTube to rebuild the carburetor and see if that did it.

After two trips to the auto parts store, two deliveries from Amazon, three weekends and a visit from an engineer friend from church, it finally chugged to life.  And it stayed running.  Two more weekends later, I had smaller piles of mulch and a bunch of limbs to cut up for firewood.  As a bonus, I sold it to a friend at work for what I paid for it. 

Without the help of YouTube, I wouldn't have been able to accomplish this one. It makes me wonder, though, how many people watch YouTube and get in over their heads?