Hi folks,
I picked up a super clean HR-21 yesterday after the spark plug threads in my old freebie Toro Super Recycler tore out of the head (I suspect they had been cross threaded and tapped before). Absolutely love the mower, easiest starting of any I've owned, strong self propulsion, and really delivers a perfect cut.
Anyway, the one gripe I have about it is it seems to require a fairly long warm-up period before I can take it off choke to "high" idle. If I do it too fast, it will die. The second, possibly related, issue is that I seem to have to gingerly engage the blade again after I stop and let it idle for a second. If I re-engage the blade it will either bog down or sometimes stall out.
My first thought was compression, being 40 years old, but it doesn't smoke at all, and I mean not at all, which is a first for me even with newer high quality mowers. Any suggestions where to being trouble shooting? Being so old I am not finding much info on these mowers other than folks waxing poetically about how great they were!