Your comment about the various owners of Murray is interesting... it seems that Murray is an unwanted child, an ugly duckling that nobody wants...
So it could be that my deck (Husqvarna) originally came with the machine... and I'm blaming the previous owners.
Well, my assessment of my system can be seen in the following scheme:
View attachment 65442
As soon as I finish resolving the gaps I will confirm... or not...
Murray was the biggest manufacturer of mowers in the USA making mowers for just about every one apart from Toro & MTD
I know this because in the Murray master parts list is the colour code prefixes and they contain all of the makers propriotity colours , ie, JD Yellow, Viking Green , 2 different Husqvarna oranges , ford blue etc etc etc
However like every listed business it is always for sale all you have to do is buy a majority of the shares .
So Murray was owned by a variety of other companies , many of which saw it as a cash cow, so starved it of developement capital .
Murray made mowers for a lot of people including some for Noma ( who also made mowers for other companies ) who went bust and to protect their debt Murray bought out Noma but it was too big a fish to swallow so Murray went bust . When this happened B & S ( who was also going bust ) was owed a small fortune so they bought Murray to protect their debt.
When they did this MTD played B & S like a fiddle threatening to no longer fit B & S engines to any of their mowers if B & S continued to run Murray in opposition to MTD so B &S broke up Murray , closed down the USA factories and shifted the export business to China.
AFAIK B & S Ended up with Ferris & Simplicity the same way , I know for a fact they got Victa that way as Victa's debt to B &S was against shares and Victa owed B &S so much that this ended up being over 20% of the share value & under Aust business law if you acquire more than 17% of a business's share you either have to sell down to under that level of make a take over offer and the instant that the share market gets a sniff that any business is in trouble the deck jockies dump the share for any price they can get so the share price of Victa dropped 72% in a month
Then when the "agreement" time had expired MTD dropped B & S engines and the drop in sales volumes combined with the cost of taking over Murray was too much for B & S so they went bust .
Despite what most think there is next to no profit in making lawn mowers .
Most have gone down the high volume low profit margin path so the end user sees the lowest possible ticket price ( car makers are doing the same ) .
The big danger with this is if you loose a few percent of market share then you quickly go into a loss situation.
General Motors have been running their production lines at a loss for ages .
They make all of their profits from the various arms of GM finance
I would imagine Ford is very close to being the same