So I was trying to do the honorable thing working on a push mower for my new tenant that is moving into my rental house next week. Single mother that wants to try and cut the grass herself and last tenants left a mower that was in decent working order but clearly not kept up. I did the obvious oil change and new spark plug, cleaned the carb, exposed the needle to adjust the carb a bit richer (suck on that EPA!), fixed the self-propelling mechanism.
After all that, could not get the darn thing to crank for the life of me. Checked all electrical connections and wasn't getting fire. Took the top apart to check and clean the magneto. Put it all back together. NOTHING. How could this be...it was running before I started working on it so what happened?
I got to looking around the ground wire/safety switch and noticed that there were two wires splitting out of the wire loom and one of them went to the rear of the mower ducking under the cowling up around the bagger chute.
I'll be danged if there was a little mechanism that detects either the bag or the chute plug (for mulching) and the metal bar on either of those two that sits down in the latch completes the circuit, and without either the bag or chute plug I guess it grounds out the magneto and you get no sparky.
Threw the bag back on it, and VROOOOOOOOMMMMMMMMM!