Drove it around the owners yard, even cut some of his grass with it. Everything seemed ok and we agreed on a price. I returned a couple of days later with the truck and trailer and brought it home.
The next day I was online and saw the great deal for Grandpa (the 195) - so we hurriedly unloaded the 222 and took off on a crazy drive to Sarnia to pick up the 195 and bring it home...
The following week I went to start Maxine and do a couple of laps around the yard as the grass was getting long... Maxine didn't want to start...

Words were said



So yesterday before the storm I took the mower deck off and pushed Maxine back into the tent garage behind Max so I could start figuring out why her attitude.

Popped the hood open and I immediately noticed the pile of dried grass behind the dash,

I'm sure I didn't notice this when I was originally looking at the machine before I agreed to the price...

and all the messy electrical tape covering most of the wires. Cleaned up the grass and pulled back some of the electrical tape... seems a previous owner had problems with mice -
- every wire on the back of the ignition switch had been chewed on

Spent several hours this morning doing a combination of making up new wires, or cutting out the mangy sections and repairing them with heat shrink butt connectors.
Handy thing to have is this generic electrical connector kit - perfect for releasing connectors from plugs so you can re-use the original plastic connectors
Going to go out later and get some liquid electrical tape to seal up the wires coming out of the plug with the resistors / diodes or whatever is hiding in the chunk of epoxy...
might have to get a replacement for that eventually...
So far mission accomplished, the back of the Ignition switch looks all nice and clean and tidy now.