I would call that quite a bit of trouble for the mower actually mainly because of the deck. A lot more deck should never have to be replaced!
How smart is have a very bad tendency of one of the rear deck supports breaking the weld and falling off of the deck.
This is because the bean counters etc have them put one little maybe half inch long weld if you're lucky in two spots on one side only.
If they would actually weld it like any actual professional welder or even a backyard welder would do instead of having some program machine do it that little tiny bit, it would never fail.
The other ways that someone might feeling need to replace a deck I don't understand unless the thing totally rusted out but that's also so rare and if that's the case that means someone is mowing wet grass and or not cleaning the grass underneath and not treating it or maybe spraying the underneath with WD-40 or anything like that or they're using that awful deck wash Port which does far more harm to a machine than good.
I seen a few decks get thin here and there but it's not the entire deck and they can always be patched up with some sheet metal, and old coffee can or license plate or just some of the good metallic HVAC tin foil tape works surprisingly well.
Everything else like spindles either police brackets and stuff can all be replaced and repaired.
So I am a little interested to know why you had to replace the deck and I'm thinking that and most people situations, or a specially in mind, I certainly wouldn't have bought a new deck because a new deck is outrageously high and it comes bare where you have to transfer everything over or buy those new parts too and that's like going to be 300- $400 so that's a no-go for me.
Batteries, of course I make no judgments on because they're all junk now and anything after 3 years is on really borrowed time if you get that long.
The starter gear had something else going on.
Either there was some slight mismatch with the alignment and mesh and it was putting unnecessary pressure on it or it was being cranked excessively every time it started and not starting within 2 to 3 revolutions or under 3 seconds of cranking like it should.
There have been people with mowers who don't realize this is a problem and they are doing about three sets of extended cranking every time they go to mow their grass when they start their mower for the day.
Other people may be in a situation where their mower is started far more than it's really designed to be.
The thing is really designed to be started no more than once a week and use the entire time and then put away.
That's the most common use.
There's only a smaller percentage of people who have to turn off their mower to refuel or who will turn it off between cutting the front and rear lawns or different days etc or those who cut more than one lawn with it but again not the vast majority of people.
Most of those gears are the plastic dark colored one and I will agree they are cheap and junky.
Did you replace them with OEM Briggs & Stratton gear or did you use them from eBay Amazon aftermarket?
I will not buy the brand name starters because they're overpriced and the aftermarket ones work quite nicely, if not better, but the gears are a crapshoot..
There are some good aftermarket ones and some not so good ones so if I ever had one fail under three or four years I would probably just go back to a Briggs & Stratton one and try that one.
Most mowers go their entire 20-year life and never have the gear fail or at most are on there second gear from a big replaced one time.
Anything beyond that has some type of issue that's not in the normal use parameters.
But overall, yes, you're doing pretty decent.
A whole lot of people got 17 to 20 plus years from these consumer grade mowers whether it be husqvarna, Craftsman (which most of those were made by Husqvarna also for that time period), MTD brand products like Troy-Bilt, Cub cadet and even yard machines, or John Deere's.
Now let's don't think for one second that the l, la, d, and E John Deere's are one bit better because they're painted yellow and green and called a John Deere. They are department store mowers sharing most of the same parts as the other brands. They just cost a little more because of the color scheme and the brand.
They have even had more steering gear failures than the MTD products and probably right about the same as the Craftsman's because steering is their weekly too which also applies to Husqvarna but they just don't saturate most markets as well as Craftsman did during the day.
But my point is so many people got this kind of time and service out of these mowers because they were still fairly well built.
I get troy-bilts coming out of regular basis with belts that are 17 years old that are still spinning the blades and still moving the mower. They are cracked to pieces and have big chunks of rubber missing but you could still mow the yard with them!
So you could have had more problems especially if it has a Briggs engine like with compression release, blown head gaskets if it's a single, or if it was a Kohler courage single, the self-destruction because of the improperly torqued/fastened bolts on the top engine case cover.
So I guess you're doing okay but I just come to expect that out of those mowers because they were pretty good.
Most things are getting quite a bit watered down now and we probably won't fare quite as well in the future especially not with walk behind mowers and those new Briggs engines.
