more Stargrazer work

I took up new fuel line pressure hose to the CAO to replace the old, cracked piece between the fuel filter and engine. I had changed the filter a couple of weekends back. We hoped this would fix the stalling problem. Dietmar helped me with the fuel line change.

On Saturday, I started cutting the south lawn and everything seemed good. But then the same signature problem reappeared, particularly when listing to the left and climbing a grade. Finally, the riding mower died. We did lots of fiddling and poking and prodding. We cleaned all the crap from atop the cutting deck. Fired it up. It seemed to work but sputtered as I bounced in the seat. Almost like the dead man switch was functional—but that didn't make sense since it was tricked out.

We were able to finish cutting the lawn. Kiron, Dipak, Dietmar, and Phil helped.

Sunday, I went to the garage to reinstall the left cowling. Ask Kiron to help. As we moved the mower from the garage outside to get some more light, I felt the seat shift. Oh oh. Should not push on it, I guess.

I looked at the seat supports and found that they were failing. In fact, it clearly had been happening for some time, given the rust along the cracks. But there was new shiny exposed bits, as the supports began to collapse. We removed the supports (after removing the rear fender). I found the part numbers. Tony said there's a shop near us who can order the parts.

Looks like this was the root cause of the motor problem: as the seat moved and flexed on the weakened the supports, it was causing the kill switch to activate...