I see you took the "dull" requirement literally.

I bet having the blades on in the wrong orientation put a ton more wear on your belt, and you were probably burning more fuel than necessary too.

Man, your dad is so happy that not only was he asked for help in the first place, but was able to immediately identify a separate issue.

Free upgrade! Blades are probably sharp as new!

At least your cutting edge is still sharp, that's something I guess

Yeah! Screw grass!

My father-in-law bought an electric push mower. The lady was selling it because it didn't cut very well. We looked at it and pretty quickly came to the conclusion the blade was on upside-down, only this blade couldn't really be put on upside-down. I took it apart and swapped the leads on the mower and it worked great.

Ah. Here we have a shining illustration of the Dork's Universal Law Of Sharpness: The faster it moves, the sharper it gets.

If you swing your sword hard enough, see, it doesn't matter much that it's actually a piece of 1/2" rebar. The same applies to mower (and helicopter!) blades, machetes, manhole lids thrown at meteoric speeds e.g. by tornadoes, etc.

I'd bet they were still sharp when you turned them around though!!

Got a hand-me down more from a relative years back. Cut with it for a while but always thought it did a bad job. Went to check the blades... Upside down.

Best part was the relative swore up and down the was no way he would have done that.

Taking a deck off is so easy with a drive over deck. Pull one lever, back over it and done. To mount the deck, drive back over the deck and it it hooks up all by itself.

Worth every penny.

Well now you have fresh sharp unused blades for free! Minus the cost to your ego in front of your dad....

They put them on goddamn backwards

honestly ... I've mounted one of the two blades backward a while ago. It was an fairly easy discovery, one blade cut grass, the other just smashed it around which gave a lot of rumble in the deck

edit: wait ..... you managed driving around with blades for 2 years?? I meet so many stones I sometimes wonder if I make it 2 hours. (yes, I once cleared the garden of stones, but Swedish soil is very much alive, they re-appear in other places only to move to another place again and again)

I've never seen a mower blade that could be mounted incorrectly.

Wait do mower blades rotate clockwise? From looking down at the deck or from looking up at the blades??

That's not on you for the first 6 months. 2 years is a long time though.