Good numbers. OK, the "thing" what "pops up" is known correctly as the Starter Drive Gear Assembly. Starter Drive will suffice. It is nearly universally accepted to refer to this component as the "Bendix". The "rubbing noise" you hear is the combined sounds of the starter armature "growling" because it is stalled, and the slow motion sounds of compression changes (which normally happen so fast you can't pick them out) in the cylinders. And remember....it did not go kaput "all of a sudden", it gradually became reluctant to start. It has only just now crossed the line from "reluctant to crank" to "I will not crank no matter how much profanity you heap on me". If the weather has turned cooler in your area over the past few weeks, that is likely why it SEEMS as if the problem "just occurred". Cooler temps will further reduce critical valve clearance to the point that the "compression release feature" of the engine cannot automatically lower combustion chamber pressures during the cranking phase of starting the engine. Get Walt's instructions, study them carefully, and decide if you want to adjust them yourself, or if you feel like "farming it out" to a shop. Good luck.

Well after reading this...it scares me. I've been in the industry for over 30 years, and there are pros for both methods as well as cons. Choose wisely as it can affect your future situations. First, one post talks about setting doors in on top of floors to eliminate cutting around casing. This is WRONG on many levels. First if the door is exterior it has to set directly on the main floor, either concrete or subfloor. If interior use a piece of 1/2 inch drywall for doors and for the base to leave a gap. If your doors already go all the way down just use a jamb saw to trim the casing and there will be no cut lines around them. This is why they make the saw. Also, think, if you put your doors, trim, or cabinets on top of a floor and then there is a problem with your floor, you have to remove it all. This adds risk and cost. But, if you use shoe mold or quarter round, then you never affect anything but that part. Imaging breaking $5000 worth of granite because you put flooring under your cabinets and couldn't get it out without removing them. Yes you could cut around them but what if water was involved? Do you want water there underneath where it can mold?. Shoe is cheap, quick and easy. Minimal added expense to protect the possibilities. You can remove flooring without affecting surface materials and vice versa. Sure, flooring installers like to do floor first because it's easier and faster with less cutting. But they don't pa for the problems that arise in the future. Think hard about saving a very small amount of money in the scheme of your project. I will NEVER do a job where the flooring is underneath, I'd rather just walk away and let someone else absorb the risk.

I grow organic and have done so for 30+ years. Never used a synthetic chemical on my property. Never bought a bottle of RoundUp. I am a purist, for sure and I'm very happy as a grower with the way I garden and the results. I use mulch extensively to control weeds. I have used some landscape fabric under pathways. Around shrubs and trees, we use chopped leaves over cardboard or bark mulch over cardboard. We save cardboard boxes and cut them up with a box cutter in the spring and lay them down and cover with either the chopped leaves or bark mulch depending on the application. And if you don't have enough of your own cardboard boxes, if you have Freecycle in your area, someone is always posting they have free boxes to offer. We have a lot of trees in neighboring yards, mostly Maples and one of our neighbors rakes his leaves to our lot line and pushes them over into our yard, by mutual agreement. So we have a lot of leaves. Some are Silver Maple leaves which are small and break down fast, and don't really need to be chopped. Others that are larger, we will just lay out on the lawn on a dry day and mow as usual. I love this mix of grass clippings and chopped leaves as a mulch in my vegetable beds. In shrub beds, a layer of cardboard in the spring, covered by a couple of inches of bark mulch will last all season without weeding for the most part. We try not to replace bark mulch every year. Sometimes if we put it on thick enough we don't have to replace more than every other year. And we can feel great about recycling all that cardboard. Better still, earthworms love cardboard. And we don't use bark mulch across the entire shrub bed. The shrub bed is along the lot line and a distance away from the areas we use the most, and some of it is under the dripline of trees, so we use chopped leaves on most of the bed and just use bark mulch along about a two foot strip along the front of the bed. That works for us, and I'm happy with it. It cuts down on the amount of bark mulch we have to use. In my most active bed, a 20x20 combination of perennials, shrubs and annuals, I mulch over the winter with chopped leaves, remove the mulch in early spring to allow for reseeding and to get a good look at what is coming up. I keep a barrel of the leaves on hold in the garage until I've finished working in the bed. When I've moved what I want to move, sown seed where I want to sow it and then whatever bare ground is there, I will add some chopped leaves as mulch. But really there's not much bare ground left. [g] I don't use cardboard in that bed, I don't seem to need it. As for Preen - never considered using it and because of my basic decisions to avoid synthetic chemical use, I don't end up having to think about what is in it, or what it does. I can just ignore it and garden. [g] But for your benefit here is a link that discusses the ingredients in Preen... Ingredients in Preen

I have had the Miele Speed/Wall/CSO ovens for almost 9 years now. I love all 3 of them and would buy them again. The speed oven works great as a second oven - it has almost all the oven modes as my wall oven. It does have a lower max temp than the wall oven but that has not been an issue for me. I can fit all of my baking pans in the oven. The largest baking sheet that fits comfortably is a jelly roll size sheet. It works fine as a microwave, but I am not a big microwave user. Usually just use the minute button and stop the oven when I need to. I do use the lower power setting if heating up something more delicate. The speed function is ok but use it rarely - mainly to speed up baking potatoes. Being retired - speed cooking is not a need for me anymore. The wall oven is wonderful. It heats relatively quickly, is VERY quiet (important for me), and bakes very evenly. I love all the different cooking modes and the masterchef features. Both the speed and the wall oven have been very reliable. I agree they are pricey and definitely more expensive than when I purchased them in 2015. Have you looked at the advantium to pair with a GE wall oaven? There is a lot of love for that oven on this forum. If you search Advantium in discussions your should find serveral threads. Seems that might be more cost effective.