On Mon, 1 Dec 2008 10:52:20 -0800 (PST), stryped
wrote:

On Dec 1, 12:04*pm, Don Foreman wrote:
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?

Seehttp://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. *

Was it hard to take apart or did you have to take it apart?

I didn't need to disassemble anything beyond dismounting the starter
from the engine. I just applied some Tri-Flo and worked the
mechanism back and forth until minor rust spots were knocked off and
it was working freely. When you push the button, the pinion should
move axially against the spring.