ok,the starter isn't bound up,i looked at it earlier today.I went ahead and also tried to use a "pully puller" today to try and take the flywheel off and all that happend was the bolts i used bent under the strain.The pully puller kept cocking sideways on me.I'll probably just go ahead and get me a used motor and put on it.The way I understand is that the motor is probably locked up anyway,but for the record that is how it died that day,just cutting some high grass.I'm thinking that the grass/weeds that got stuck in the belt and pully's on top of the mowing deck brought the blade to a real fast stop and that sheared the pin,could it not happen that way???Like i said "i am a beginner small engine mechanic". The motor had plenty of oil in it when i started cutting grass that day and it still has oil in it as of today when i checked it just to be on the safe side.Thanks again Walt for your replys and suggestions.I'll try again in the morning to get the flywheel off.When i went to the hardware store to get a couple of bolts for the pully puller i x-plained what the motor looked like and he even said it was a sheared pin but the motor not spinning has got him puzzled.Any Ideas???Thanks again folks..Bobby in Tennessee

Even I think this argument is a bit spurious. Let's break it down point by point. Lead and other nasties in the environment from coal plants is ridiculous. There's no argument there and I'm not even going to bother finding the links. I'm also in an 80% coal-fired area, yet listen to people complaining about the tiny amounts of cadmium compounds from what comes off my painting palette. If one runs on solar, there might be a slight advantage to going electric. Wind, definitive. I'm not a vast fan of solar due to the amounts of rare earths gobbled to produce it. Battery recycling is, unfortunately, at not such great percentages. Half of lithium batteries get recycled. That's a lot of discarded--and very rare--lithium. It's produced by spallation in the atmosphere, mostly (cosmic rays and oxygen/nitrogen, with a bit from the Big Bang nucleosynthesis; stellar nuclear reactions actually destroy lithium). We're not exactly swimming in the stuff. So toss that argument right in the garbage along with those batteries. You recycle yours? Great! Half those got thrown away for lack of any interest in retrieving the materials. (Most seem to think that lithium-ion batteries are used; they're not, they're too unstable for exterior use. Those use very little lithium. Most exterior batteries are lithium-iron, which require far more. Some might be lithium-manganese, ditto. The same is true for most newer chemistries, of which there are a few, most not in the common market yet). 99.3% of lead batteries are recycled. That...sounds good, but they retrieve the lead plates and lead sulfate material in the gunk, and throw out the rest. And nobody uses lead in electrics any longer, they're too heavy and the electrical potential is too low. They're great in car batteries, though. Ground vs. Air distribution...immaterial datapoint, actually, that would only impact the direct user and a few other people at most. Once atmospheric mixing occurs--give that two puffs of wind and a single pass over a warm lawn--it's done for. Point in fact, you've just argued against power plants. Their pollution (heavy in carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, water vapor, a very strong greenhouse gas, and so on) is distributed in the atmosphere high enough that grasses, trees, and other landscape has no chance to bind it before it can mix and head for the stratosphere. Spillage...visit a coal plant sometime. The entire place is sterile and covered in coal bits tracked around, dropped off trucks. We won't discuss coal mines or, for that matter, Centralia, Pennsylvania. And some of us are quite careful with our gas, thank you. I've accidentally spilled more due to my gas station having an extremely wonky gas dispenser. Cosmetic... Well, yes. Personally, I don't. In either case, one is using electricity or gas, both resources, to make the place look nicer. Maybe don't do that if it offends you, but leave others to do as they please while pointing it out in...well, frankly, a slightly less touchy manner. Blowing grass clippings...um, who does this any longer? Everybody I know and see here has mulching mowers. On rare occasions, I might see somebody blow them off the driveway if they're incredibly heavy and a potential problem. It's interesting to note that they're a water pollutant if left on the driveway, washed into the sewer drain, and go into there, hence the rivers (around here, our sewers dump directly into the river, then into the Atlantic). Phosphorus and nitrogen lead to algal blossoms. Not at all a healthy thing for the oceans as they cause anoxic zones. We're advised to remove them when possible. So if we want to be Earth friendly, they need to be removed.

For a few months now, we've been hearing a harsh screech at night, but it's not a screech owl-we finally saw it and heard it at dusk-it was a woodpecker-we were very surprised, but relieved to finally know what it was-one night, we heard a number of them calling-some softer than others and assumed it was the babies.

Well, at least some of what I heard appears to be a couple of Night Herons as I finally saw one while making the call. It looked like a Yellow-Crowned Night Heron as I thought I saw a strong black and white pattern on it's face, but it was low light so I could have been mistaken. It and it's partner both took off almost as soon as I saw them too, so I only got a fleeting glimpse of them. Strange though, the call was much more repetitious than what I read or heard online. It also was lower than most of the calls I listened to online. I also don't know what they're doing up in tall trees most of the night instead of down by some body of water hunting. Maybe it's something about the environment around here in my part of eastern Kansas? LOL We do have a lot of Seagulls but they're almost always flying up high at between about 200' to 500' zig-zagging around non-stop all day it seems. The only time I see them down on the ground is in or near 1 of the large reservoirs here in Kansas, but those are some 75 to 100 miles from my place.