On Mon, 1 Dec 2008 05:48:09 -0800 (PST), stryped
wrote:

I took that old techmseh apart his weekend. I had a question. It is
electric start and has never worked that I can remember. I could
always hear it spin when we tried to use it and assumed that teeth
were missing on the flywheel. But this wekend when I took it apart,
all the teeth were on both the pinion gear and the flywheel. When I
connected the starter to voltage, it spun. The problem seems to be
that the pinion gear is about half an inch or more from the flywheel
gear and the two never come in contact. Is the pinion gear on the
starter supposed to "move forward" when voltage is supplied to engage
the teeth? What could this problem be?

See
http://www.indiacar.com/infobank/battery1_od.htm

The bendix drive won't engage if it is at all dirty or rusty. I had
the same problem last Saturday on my 20-year-old Tecumseh SnowKing. A
bit of Tri-Flo fixed it right up.