Can't believe I found this thread on page 2! Guess I never hit the email notification from this site! Saxman, I appreciate your insight but to be honest if I had the knowledge and will to swap motors on the HRT it would be rational thinking to assume I tried everything else. Never did I say I didn't, correct? I ended up finding a brand used (I said it!) HRX217HXA and what a machine it is! The very first time I cut my grass with it I hasn't mowed in 3weeks and with the height all the way up, I was cutting ~8" of grass off the top. Not only that but it rained the entire previous day and only stopped raining some time the night before when I was asleep. I cut at about 10am do no time for the lawn to dry. It was the epitome of the test I was looking for and on 100% mulch, there was barely a blade left to speak of! I was more than satisfied and actually very impressed with the cut quality in the given conditions. I still miss my HRT though from time to time. It was a ber nimble mower that could be tossed about with ease. Not so with the HRX, it's much more substantial and has roughly 20lb or so more bulk to contend with. Now I can cut my grass whenever I need to and need not worry about over cutting or stragglers left behind!

That is an older flathead Robin engine. The "85" is just part of the model #, not the year. That may be about right, though. You can look on the deck behind the engine and find a silver tag with the model and serial number of the Snapper deck (as opposed to just the engine) and then look that up the Snapper site to find exactly what you have. You will also find the owner and parts manuals there. Go to www.snapper.com and click "literature." If you have the bag on and the chute is not plugged, the mower should always bag the grass. Your chute just got plugged. This can happen, especially with wet grass. If bagging is your - ahem - bag, then you might want to see what kind of blade you have under there and get the one with the "winglets" that bolt on to provide extra lift. That seems to prevent a lot of clogs by increasing the force through the chute. As for the drive speed lever: no, it should stay in the speed you select. The little bumps on the lever's panel are there to hold in gear, but there should be a spring behing that panel to hold it - maybe that's missing? Or else the adjustment slider down near the driven pulley's bracket is loose, allowing the driven pully to wander on the drive wheel (turntable). The tubing protruding from the side - do you mean from the side of the engine? Maybe that's the oil dipstick tube. I hope you actually have a dipstick in it! Otherwise, I'm having trouble thinking of what it would be. These are good machines that are very serviceable and still are produced new today with few changes (the engines have changed, of course). Especially if you are bagging, there is no reason it won't be productive for you.

Wally: I appreciate your explanation of the 746 watts equalling 1 hp. I checked all 6 of my physics text books and found nothing addressing this. Only 550ft lbs/sec equaling 1 hp. Although I was well aware that 746 watts was considered 1 hp in generating. Now that I think about, I have seen some English of German engines expressed in KW output. I too am a EE, however, I had almost no education in power generating or distribution. My speciality and education was in micro electronics, thus I am quiet familiar with Ohm's Law. Now an interesting question: How did James Watts make his early steam engine run when he had almost no steam pressure at the time, too little to push the piston down. This was because he had no pressure vessel that would hold steam pressure of any appreciable magnitude. I ran across the answer to this in the Henry Ford museum.

I'll try to answer some of this, but I am "supposing" on the differences between the T-K module for Tecumseh engines and the B module for Briggs and Wisconsin engines. My "guesses" of why there are 2 different modules could be listed as follows. (1) Possibly a significant difference in the potential voltages in the primary circuit of the different brands magnetos. (2) Possibly a difference in the "cranking RPM value", or the low idle RPM value, between the brands. For the module to be effective for Snapper's intents, it must be able to distinguish "cranking RPM" from "running RPM" or it is useless. Tecumseh and Briggs both seem to fail in offering any kind of "low idle RPM value" and instead refer you to "check with the equipment manufacturer", but Snapper fails to give it as well. Snapper is "evasive" about the reason and only states that "if the wrong module is used, it will DEFEAT the purpose of the interlock system. They state only that the engines will start with the wrong module in place, not how/why that happens. Why just 17 HP? pjb found the engine at a yard sale for short money.