why is everything breaking?

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Within the last few weeks I’ve had the following problem with mechanical devices.

  • rear hub on bicycle
  • crankcase gasket on lawn mower
  • 3TB hard drive used for backup for three household computers died
  • coolant leak in 2009 Dodge Caravan
  • and a CD/DVD drive on a PPC Mac mini used for backup and connection to old peripherals is showing signs of imminent failure

    • My son says that I am having problems because all my stuff is old.

    Except for the the coolant leak, I’m getting replacement parts and doing my own repairs/replacments. I’d probably look the coolant leak, except that I just finished replacing the crankcase gasket on the lawn mower engine, and don’t feel like diving into another engine right now.

    I’ve had a lot of issues over the years with the lawn mower which was built in 1994 and would replace it with a new one, except that repairing it is so much less expensive than replacing it. For instance, the crankcase gasket, PTO oil seal, and a welded muffler (which I found was busted when I pulled the engine to repair the crankcase gasket) cost me all of $35 to repair or replace. That wouldn’t even pay the taxes on a new mower.

    When I pulled the crankcase cover off, I was expecting to see an engine on it’s last legs, but the internals looked good. Over the last couple of years, it was using a lot of oil, and I was thinking that the rings were going, but now I think that the oil was just leaking out of the crankcase. Now I think that the engine might last a few more years.