Our last lawn mower was a standard gas lawn mower with a pull start which mostly worked fine for me, but my wife often had trouble with it. Eventually it started giving me trouble as well and combine that with a move to a house with a larger lawn and it was time to get a new lawn mower.
Our new lawn mower has a couple of neat features to help with getting the job done. One feature that improves on the previous model is that it’s self-propelled which helps pull some of the weight while you’re mowing.
Before you start mowing though, you need to be able to start the mower and that’s where the feature that topped my wife’s “must have” list comes in and that is a push button starter. There is a rechargeable battery in the mower that when fully charged will let you start it several times with the push of a button.
Ironically the main feature that my wife wanted in a lawn mower caused another issue. The battery is charged by a pretty standard wall wart plug with a non-standard connector. The connector is where the issue is, it has plastic clips on the sides that need to be squeezed to release the plug while you pull and if you don’t pull it just right one side will grab back onto the plug which twists the other side back on. It takes some finger strength and coordination and it was causing my wife some frustration to the point where she was considering just leaving the one end plugged in and carrying the wall wart around with her while mowing. This clever but impractical thought gave me an idea to improve the plug which lead me to this hack.
I found a $3 2.1mm male to female DC extension and used it to modify the existing cable, basically adding an inline quick connect.
It wasn’t very complicated to do so I won’t go into the details of how I actually did it other than some pictures here, but it wasn’t immediately obvious what to use for the connection until I browsed through the local electronics store so I figured it was worth showing.
Hopefully this informs or inspires, I definitely enjoyed doing it and I am proud of this little hack.
