A couple of weeks ago I attended an auction at the City of Independence City Hall. The auction was all farm and garden equipment. One of the largest categories of items at this auction was lawn mowers and garden tractors. I’ve been interested in getting some kind of lawn mower for quite some time in hopes that it would speed up the process of mowing my yard.

As I looked at the huge array of garden tractors, I new that all of them would probably go for around $500, which was considerably more than I really wanted to spend. There was one that caught my eye though. It wasn’t a garden tractor. It was a riding lawn mower — a John Deere model 68. This machine was far from new, but it looked like it was quite functional. I climbed on and tried to start it and was unable to get it to even turn over. The battery was dead. It did have a pull start, but it was an eight horse motor, and quite difficult to pull. I looked long and hard at it and decided to bid on it when it came up for auction.

When it was finally time to start the bidding for it, the auctioneer started the bidding at $500. He waited for at least 30 seconds and nobody bid on it. You have to keep in mind that the group was mostly farmers and country folks. They were interested in a tractor, not a riding mower. I finally spoke up and said, “I’ll give you $100 for it.” Another man in the audience paused and at the auctioneer’s prompts, agreed to give $110. I immediately countered with $120. After almost a minute and no further bids, I was surprised to hear the auctioneer say, “Sold!”. My $120 had bought me a mower!! What a deal! When I got home, I looked up on the net what the price of a new mower similar to that would be for John Deere and it came out to be almost $2200 retail. That $120 was a steal, if it ran. I still hadn’t seen it run.

When I got home, I was showing it off to my neighbor and he said, “I’ve got a booster battery that we could use to jump the dead battery.” He brought it over and connected up the booster. To my delight, the mower started right up and ran quite well. Since then, I’ve used it to mow my lawn a couple of times and also hauled it out to my friends farm and used it to mow his acreage a couple of times. It works great!!

–Pete