It can seem like advanced tractors haveso many features and controlsthat it ’s hard to memorize them all and put them to use . The chief lineament are well-situated enough — the dominance for the hydraulic airlift , or for betroth the pout blades on ariding lawn mower — but other features ( such as the differential ignition lock , whose value I late learned ) see less frequent use , even if they can be quite handy under the veracious circumstances .

Recently , I was using a drive lawn lawn mower to cut down theedges of a field . The green goddess , although not terribly marvellous , was nevertheless high enough to stymy from view an formicary cover with grass . In other words , it was n’t just a sight of sand and dirt — it was a problematical little knoll that was n’t going to be pushed over .

Before I acknowledge it , I had driven right across the top of the formicary , and short the mower was n’t strike anymore . The agglomerate was just grandiloquent enough to bottom out the mower and evoke the right rear wheel slightly off the ground , which mean that the lawn mower was stuck .

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Frustrated that the mower was cleave ( and confused as well , as I had n’t seen the anthill at this point ) , I considered my option . An endeavour to push the lawn mower onward did nothing , as it ’s quite heavy and was n’t interested in moving . I considered firing up a larger tractor to tow the mower to blandish ground , but then I try one of the mower ’s more unknown features — the differential lock .

But first , allow me to double back . The mower was stick in the first place because it has a differential coefficient , in sum a gear train that lease the two rearward driving wheel spin at different speeds . This is important for the lawn mower to make miserly turns without damage the tyre , but in some circumstances , it can cause trouble . In my case , with the right rack resurrect slightly off the undercoat , the left rack was being asked to do all of the study , and because the mower was stuck and reluctant to move , the leftover wheel essentially gave up any effort to move and throw all the power to the right wheel , which spin helplessly and did nothing to rid the mower .

Fortunately , the differential lock can reverse the gist of the derivative , locking the two wheels together so that they are force to spin as one , as if connect by a common axle . By engaging the differential lock chamber , I could force the left wheel to do its part and not pass the workload to the useless right wheel .

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So that ’s what I did . start up the lawn mower once again , I engaged the differential lock and slowly pushed the accelerator . The left wheel , as if finally recognise that the task was n’t as severely as it seemed , grip the ground and almost effortlessly drove the mower onward and off the formicary .

In the conclusion , freeing the lawn mower was simple , thanks to a little - used feature of speech that was there when I involve it . A tractor can never have too many feature article .