12" Qualcast Concorde

My old friend Terry asked me if I still repaired mowers and could I take a look at his.

I agreed, just to help out a friend in need, I'm sure he'd get short shrift at our local repair place if he'd tried.

Despite the "De  Luxe" designation, I soon wondered why he hadn't binned it years before.

I fitted my last new bottom blade to such a machine at least a decade ago, so I could only file the old one up to square it.

A lot of movement in the cylinder as I moved the machine around turned out to be a very well worn out spherical cylinder support bush, someone else had welded blobs around the bush on the side plate to help support it, I ask you...

I went through my small amount of Atco/Qualcast/Webb/Bosch parts and felt very lucky to find a new bush, plus rivets, and felt seal and black spring packing ring in the same kit. I had to half strip the machine out to remove and clean up the cylinder, I used a clip on ally moulding with some ally oxide grit paper glued on to grind the cylinder to the bottom blade.

I was eventually able to get it cutting thickish paper all the way along, but grinding took over an hour.

Terry's back 'lawn' is only ten feet square or a bit less, he loves to see his stripes, so I can see no other alternative to the concord for price or convenience, he won't be needing it for a while yet though!

Incidentally, a local lawn mower business packed up about 2012, I bought many wooden boxes of assorted parts there, amongst my finds were about eight 'bolt on' type grass edging attachments for concord type machines, I eventually took them all to the recycle, never sold a one, what grieved me a bit was to see all the original packing and boxes going into the skip...what a shame, same experience with six brand new Mountfield plastic rear rollers, for 16" machines.