Thinking of a lawn mower my father bought in the early 1990s: the grass that passed for lawn on the rural property turned out to be corrosive and the aluminium-alloy chassis of the thing just rotted. His previous mower was a two-speed self-propelled 5hp Honda with a steel chassis. The rotted one was a Jonn Deere with a 5hp Kawasaki engine and 5 gears on the self-propulsion system. The highest gear on each mower equated to virtually the same speed over the ground. Another problem with the John Deere: the gear selector broke and Dad locked it into 3rd gear.
He then replaced the missing deck sections with angle iron & galvanised sheet steel, a good trick considering one part carried the height adjustment mechanism. Because of the irregularities in the deck profile, mulching was no longer effective, it would clog up with cut grass instead of spreading it out over the cut area.
He could have easily afforded a new mower but as a tinkerer and instinvtive engineer, he just made do. He was 13 when the bank foreclosed on the family's market garden business in 1933 so "making do" was a serious part of his upbringing.