Craftsman 917.388382 Lawn Mower With 6HP And 21" Cut

by Ryan M. Keating
(Detroit, Michigan)

I own a Craftsman 6.0 horse power Model Number 917.388382, which is a 21" multi-cut rotary lawn mower that comes with a removable catch bag, a removable side chute, and a folding handle. I’ve owned this for eleven years and it is still working like a champ.

It was purchased from Sears, I ordered and picked it up in person at my local store (Detroit, Michigan). I use this mower to keep the grass neat on my 1/5 acre property, and it works well for this purpose. I think that it would also work for a larger yard, as the 6 HP is amply sufficient for what I put it through.

I have installed a mulching blade and do not use the chute or catch bag so that I can chop up the grass and return it to the lawn for self-fertilization. The mulching function works well if the grass is a reasonable height – if grass is over 6" tall, there is some clumping of the cut grass unless one pushes the mower very slowly or overlaps the previous cut by at least 50%.

Fortunately the Craftsman 21" mower is easy enough to use that my grass rarely gets that high! I have had nearly no problems with this mower – I will confess that I take good care of it, however, and pride myself on having a mower that always starts on the first pull no matter how longs it’s been sitting.

I either drain the gasoline in the fall at the end of the mowing season, or I use the mower until the gas has run dry. This keeps the carburetor from gumming up over the winter and allows me to fill it with gas in the spring, pull the cord, and go.

One thing I have noticed is that the instructions call for pushing the priming bulb 3 times, but I have found it necessary to push it 4 times to start on the first pull. I do occasionally disassemble the carb and clean it out just for good measure.

Another maintenance procedure that I follow, in addition to regular oil changes, is that I scrape off all of the grass that accumulates under the deck after each mowing session to cut down on rusting. The only difficulties I’ve had with this Craftsman lawn mower are minor. (The blade needs sharpening periodically, as do all mower blades. I don’t think that anyone has come up with a blade that would not need sharpening!)

I have a number of curved garden beds around my property and in order to mow effectively next to these, I have to pull and push the mower around a lot, to make it follow curves and cut the grass in small areas between beds. It gets tiresome to have to haul the machine back and forth in these areas, but it’s mostly my fault, I guess, for creating a patchwork of lawn instead of having a single large rectangle of sod to mow.

Another thing I’ve noted is that even though both sides of the mower will get right up next to a fence (because I use it without the side chute), occasionally the handle on the pull cord will catch itself in the fence and stop me. One other slight irritation is that the entire mower needs to be turned upside down to empty out the engine oil—what??!!

So I usually do this when the gas tank is empty! Another good use for this Craftsman 917.388382 mower, using the catch bag, is to chop leaves in the fall. "Vacuuming" up the leaves with the mower chops them and deposits them neatly into the bag, whereupon they can be dumped onto a compost heap to decompose for next year’s fertilizer.