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Greetings,
As I don't have a repair manual for my Toro TimeMaster, I am hoping that someone can point me in the right direction.

My mower is ~12 months old, and recently, the blades started to randomly disengage. The motor does NOT stall. But for no reason (that I can determine), even though the clutch is fully engaged, the blades spin down and stop. The motor is still running... but the blades are not. If I release the clutch, and pull it back, the blades start back up. Sometimes. Sometimes the blades will start on the first re-engage. Other times, it takes two or three clutch engages until they 'catch'. They I'm good for another 5 - 20 minutes. Very unusual behavior.

Thanks in advance for any guidance anyone can provide. Toro Customer Support was really quite awful - I thought an Internet forum may be better...

Sounds like a safey switch problem so the easiest way to test is to bypass everything and power it direct from the battery with some custom jumper leads.
make sure you put a fuse in them. You can acually use the fuse as a switch for a short time just to test .
If it works fine then your battery and the clutch are OK and you have a problem in the wiring.
There should be a wiring diagram in the back of the owners manual.
If it still drops out then the battery/charging system require looking at.
Most clutches will drop out at anything under 10V.

Do not decide to mow with the system bypassed as it is very dangerious

Hello bertsmobile1 - thank you for the quick reply. I will take a closer look at the mower, but I wasn't aware it had a battery or a bypass switch at all. One of the TimeMaster models does have an electric start option (with a battery), but mine is the lower-end pull-start model. Everything I can see strikes me as very mechanical in nature, but it's entirely possible there may be more going on under the plastic covers...

bertsmobile1 said:

Sounds like a safey switch problem so the easiest way to test is to bypass everything and power it direct from the battery with some custom jumper leads.
make sure you put a fuse in them. You can acually use the fuse as a switch for a short time just to test .
If it works fine then your battery and the clutch are OK and you have a problem in the wiring.
There should be a wiring diagram in the back of the owners manual.
If it still drops out then the battery/charging system require looking at.
Most clutches will drop out at anything under 10V.

Do not decide to mow with the system bypassed as it is very dangerious

Click to expand...

You are still in the warranty period, so take it back to the dealer. There are no safety switches, I suspect that you have an idler pulley that is going bad. Don't fool with it and void your warranty.

I had the same problem is this was the solution, it happened right around 12 months of service.