The deck on the "new" mower is totally sound, without any hint of rust, and underneath was fairly clean also, without any layer of wet cuttings practically glued on. It may be that the mower hadn't seen a lot of actual use, finally became impossible to start, and just sat in someone's garage for years until the order finally came from the "higher authority" to clean out that garage. But that's speculation. I didn't mind sinking the time into cleaning and investigating, as I like tinkering like that. I thought that getting the engine to run would give me a better machine overall, and my fall-back option was to just swap in the working engine from the old mower.
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