I can't get over how so many people want you to dump the gas. This is wrong. First check the spark plug. Rough the gap up with some emery cloth. Put the plug back in Get some STP and put a couple of tablespoons in the full gas tank of your mower. When everything is reassembled, open the air filter compartment, and spray once with some engine starter fluid. Cover it back up. Try to start the engine. It may start then stop a few times, keep trying. For me it was the 3rd time. Then I tilted the engine up slightly and gave a it a few good revs before setting out on the lawn. I'm attaching the video showing it running. I bought my Troy-Bilt TB230C Self-Propelled Mower at the end of last summer after my 30 year cheapest Briggs and Stratton engine mower I bought at Home Depot finally crapped out. It worked great for the last few cuts of the season. We stored it in the shed. I've never, ever taken gas out of a lawn mower. I've always been able to start them year after year with none of the above steps. However, now I know how to get it started. My husband has been working on "broken" and thrown out lawnmowers all his life (from his teenage years). His parents would find one on the side of the road and bring it home for him to work on.

Are you checking the oil level? Both before you start initially and when it won't start hot? A little more description of just what is happening might help. The engine doesn't want to turn over or turns over but won't fire? There is a possibility that the carb float needle is leaking gas into the intake, then into the cylinder and on down into the oil (not good). However, you put on a new carb and it still does not do right. What you hear as dripping MAY be the hot muffler cooling and making cracking noises perhaps from running too hot due to partially sheared flywheel key or lean carb mixture. I think I would be inclinded to check the flywheel key. You should be able to do that by removing the cooling shroud, the flywheel mut or bolt and washer and looking down the keyways to see that the keyway in the flywheel and crankshaft line up. Also, installing an inline gas shut off valve and using it when engine is not running might be a good idea. I can send you a PDF of the Service Manual for that engine if you like. Address below, put in proper format and remind me, model number etc. Walt Conner wconner5 at frontier dot com

"The last time it acted up i checked and had the 24 volts coming from the thermostat to the board but no voltage from the board to the contactor which is what made me think a pressure switch may be locking the voltage out" I want to be clear about something... When you say "the board", do you mean the control board that sits inside your furnace\blower? If so, that's what I mean as well. That board does a lot of things (including the timed shut-off delay mentioned below) but as far as I know, all it does to turn the condenser unit on or off is sent 24 volts over two lines to the unit, specifically the contactor within the unit. There certainly may be more complicated control systems out there but that's the way traditional A\C systems were set up. In such systems, the control board has absolutely no idea of what any "pressure switch" inside the condenser unit is doing, no idea of whether you have no coolant in the lines, no idea of any sort of problem or situation that might exist within the condensing unit. When that control board wants to turn on the condenser unit, it simply sends 24 volts down those little wires. If you turn your thermostat down far enough to signal that you want the room cooler, the thermostat sends a signal to the control board in the furnace, which then turns the blower on by the coils, and then sends the 24 volts to the condensing unit. If in fact you have "no voltage from the board to the contactor" despite you adjusting the thermostat to start the cooling cycle, then your first concern would be to understand why the board or the wires from the board aren't working properly. If, on the other hand, you mean some sort of control board within the condenser unit itself, one that acts as a second brain (third if you count the thermostat) in the system and takes into account information from within the condenser such as high and low pressure readings before sending the 24 volts along to the contactor, then sure, you might well have an issue with that particular board or the pressure sensors or perhaps a whole bunch of things. Don't know. What I do know is that if you are indeed talking about this sort of internal control within the condenser itself and when you think it should be triggering the contactor but you can't detect any juice between the internal board and the contactor, then your problem isn't the contactor. The only way you can determine whether a contactor is bad is to send 24 volts to it. If you do that but the 220 volt lines within the unit aren't energized, then it's the contactor and indeed, because contactor issues can be all about carbon buildup on the contacts, you might have the symptoms you describe. But if the contactor isn't getting the 24 volts at all, you need to look for another answer. I strongly suggest that you turn this over to a repair tech given that you're no longer talking about replacing a $12 contactor in 15 minutes. Nick in Palm Springs

I don't see how anything was deceptive about telling people they might need to do something. Around here it was very clear that you may need a new antenna or you may need to aim your antenna differently after the changeover. There's also websites set up talking about different antennas. The stations don't financially benefit from the change realistically. In some ways it's a penalty to them too. But I'm annoyed that they pushed back the changeover fearing that someone in South Togo might miss 15 minutes of Another World. I do get a kick out of the local PBS ads suggesting people go help neighbors and the old people hook up the converters and aim the antennas! It's kind of interesting. "Our PBS is changing over because they can't afford not to. They'd run out of money before June, they say. Since they depend on donations, I believe them." I don't understand this at all. Except that after the analog shut off of course they'd be off the air if they didn't change! How will the digital signal, and early, financially benefit them? Unless they're expecting a windfall from adding an extra channel or two, but I don't think that could be it. It won't affect their cable/satellite income so that couldn't be it. I don't understand this comment at all. Would you explain? I do agree, we've put up with these ads long enough. Pull the dang bandaid off the scab and let's move on. Now there's more commercials. And actually, that's costing the commercial stations in lost ad time. I too do not get the "crystal clear" reception touted as an advantage to it. I'm waiting until the conversion is complete and then try different antennas and aiming and see if that helps. But in meantime, it works and I'm not a fanatic on having a perfect picture anyway. Even with satellite and cable I didn't have perfect picture all the time. Now that would annoy me when I had to pay over $50 for a snowy picture!