Try this: All you need to do is break the seal, which is the rubber ring around the underside of the lid.
Flip the jar upside down. Smack it on a hard surface, like the counter or the floor. Make sure you smack the entire lid flat on the hard surface, and not so hard that you bust glass or dent the lid. Denting the lid makes it worse. I’ve got the technique down, one smack, and my jars twist right open.
I use a can opener and just pop the seal with the little hook. I don’t tend to have problems opening jars.
A push-button starter on a lawnmower would require a battery and starter solenoid, which would add considerable weight, cost, and maintenance to a device intended to be light enough to push and simple to maintain. Eliminating the choke (which is the cause of a lot of problems people have with small engines) would require adding fuel injection at more cost and complexity. Most two stroke engines require no more than 30 lbf of pull force over a stroke of a dozen or so inches to give the motor enough momentum to get it running. Any adult person in reasonable health should be able to exert that force over a short distance, and as others have previously indicated, pull-starting a small engine is predominately a matter of learned technique rather than raw strength.
Stranger
It’s the reel thing. Starts every time with just a push.
I generally just bow to their superiority in these kinds of things and pay them well.
Case in point. I was widowed about a year, little more. I bought a new toilet seat. I have the world’s smallest bathroom I think, and I was down on the floor, between the toilet and vanity and I could not get those dame bolts to budge. I mean I was down there a good 45 minutes.
Fuck this.
I walked over and asked to borrow a friend’s husband. He came in, looked at the problem, lay down ON HIS BACK, leaving room to get leverage with his arms (I had been laying on my belly or side) and zap, muscled that damn thing off pronto.
I bow.
I run into this sort of problem. Luckily, I have grown-men sons, and they can help with a lot of the physical stuff that I can’t handle since I got sick.
But this year I decided I’d like to mow when I’m feeling good, so I bought a self-propelled mower. It doesn’t have a push button start, but it starts pretty easily. Nevertheless, this is my method: I take it out to my drive, which is cement and has a slight slope. That way, I can give it a good shove away as I pull the cord. If I’m in the back yard, I pull it over to the small patio, which is flat but at least smooth so I can get a better pull.
I love the self-propelled mower. My yard is a little hilly, and I can push it with no effort at all, even up the hills!
I should like to ask you a question. When I was very small, and Mother had to stop the car quickly, she would put her arm out to prevent my falling off the seat. I was driving her somewhere when she was in her eighties, I braked unexpectedly, and she threw her arm out to protect me.
Yet at some point in my twenties, she decided that I was competent to repair her dishwasher.
What is up with that?
It evens out a bit when your elderly father is awed by your ability to open jars.
YES, this. And after days of trying to pack stuff, it all looks just SO clever that I end up twittering on the sidelines along the lines of “gosh, oh you guys are amazing”. Then I realise it sounds like the dimmest little woman ever, and it’s embarrassing :o but I am genuinely impressed that this or that box can be moved, and moved oh so quickly and without apparent pain and horror. Perhaps I want to be a twenty-something young bloke. Or at least it would be useful sometimes.
I do kind of try to make amends to the universe by doing the strong person thing where I can, in a “country of the blind sense” - I mean, when there is some very old lady or old guy than whom I am actually stronger or more capable of doing something, then of course I help with whatever.
That’s what “weed eater” suggested to me too. 
Oh, I wish I had a garden so that I could have a goat.
Get a damp cloth, wrap it around your hand and that helps, but, sadly, not always. 
If desperate or really annoyed, stab the lid with a knife. Not terribly good for the knife, but there is that feeling of “at last I win, you bastard”. 
They do make those. I have had several.
I have yet to buy one that didn’t break within a short time after purchase. The rest of the mower continues to start and mow just fine, but either the cheap little motor burns out or the battery dies or the switch does.
It’s not you couldn’t make a reliable one - you have a car, right - it’s that the additional cost added to the price of a $300 mower is more than people want to pay. So they somehow cram in that cheap, barely works push starter and sell the mower for $315 with it.
Oh, yeah. They also economize by leaving out the battery charging circuitry. The starter can’t recharge using power extracted from the engine. You have to plug it into the wall, instead, and they cheap out and leave off the battery protection circuitry, so the poor battery is toast in a few months.
The $2000+ riding mowers have reliable starters, just like in a car. You get what you pay for.
The goat would eat things that he is not supposed to. :dubious:
Proper tools are a lot of help; Macho-brother attempted to mock my little ladytools a couple of times but then actually tried them and went “uh, this is good!” (yeah, they’re small because hey, size 4 hands). Last time he needed to repaint some windows he borrowed my mouse sander.
The last time I needed to change a tyre, I couldn’t; those screws were mocking me I swear. But the dude from the garage needed a piece of tube longer than he was, with him hanging on the end of it; his cursing of the people who set the mechanical screwdrivers to their highest setting instead of to the recomended values was very heartfelt and creative. I told him “I’m sorry you had to go through all that but now I feel a bit less like a wimp”, he answered “yeah, this is total bullshit - you did know what to do and you should have been able to do it!”
Some things you can’t use tools for though: when Grandma started needing help to get up I barely could do it. For a while I went to one of those cheap gyms where you can ask for advice but nobody pushes lessons on you, later I moved again and couldn’t do that but I still could do stuff like pushups, pushes against the wall, exercises with a rubber band, etc.
I think my mom still does that to me as well, and I’m 50 and have to open jars for her.
Luckily my boys learned some repair and manual labor skills along the way–not from me, mind you–and are able to take care of my yard and truck fairly well. I could do the yard until this last year when my health declined. Now I do the easy part: bossing. I’m still good at that.
It sounds like the mower thing may have been fixed for you by the advice of many willing people, but for the overall question I’d say you just have to try, try, try again and then sometimes admit you can’t do it. Same as if you were two foot tall and couldn’t find something that would enable you to reach up to whatever you wanted.
Some power tools, even lawnmowers, do seem to depend on strong hand strength and are based on male hand size and grip. If your hands are small even for a woman that can make operating those tools difficult because you can’t grip in the way they were designed for. I used to have to operate power tools two-handed because my hands are very small and don’t reach around the shaft (heh) of most drills, etc. So trying two-handed operation might help too.
It is worth remembering that tools are generally designed for men who have bigger hands. I was once given a pink toolkit that actually did work a lot better for me because it was designed to be smaller, as patronising as having a pink toolkit sounds.
Learn how to tie a slippery hitch (clove hitch with a bight*) and make the loose end of the bight about 6" long (with the other loose end very short). It will hold the handle in place, but will release quickly with a pull of the bight’s loose end.
*What is here called a slipped not. It’s a quick-release technique such as used in making a shoelace bow.
I finally got it!
I called in a handyman to look the machine over, just to make sure my difficulties weren’t due to something mechanical. As I suspected, they weren’t.
So this guy (who I am forever indebted to) gave me a lesson in cord pulling. Maybe he lurks on the SDMB because the winning trick was posted by Sasquatch:
Yesterday I was bummed out because I wasted yet another morning trying to get that dang thing started. So just a few minutes ago, I had the biggest smile on my face as I mowd my grass. There will never be another time when I’ll be so happy doing yardwork.
I AM THE LAWNMOWER-STARTER CHAMPION OF THE WORLD.
With RA, I never know what kind of grip I may have available on any given day. So I went electric with all my yard-care gear.
If I’m having a flare up and just can’t do any of the physical stuff, I call in the neighborhood handyman. He’s a retired contractor and can (and will) do almost any small job around the house.
Yeahbuddy!!
