I have a customer�s 2009 John Deere LA115 ride on mower with a 19.5 HP Briggs & Stratton 31P series engine that won�t start.
A few weeks ago the engine wouldn�t idle under 3,000rpm so I cleaned the carby and adjusted it.
Then a week later it came back with a flat battery. The starter solenoid had shorted internally and one of the rubber boots had melted when they tried to crank the engine.
I replaced the solenoid which stopped the short but the starter can�t crank the engine using a fully charged battery.
When turning the engine over by the flywheel screen it builds up much more compression than normal, which points towards a compression release issue.
There is no binding from the drive belts and it spins over perfectly without the spark plug.
It used to run without any abnormal sounds and has just turned over to 300 hours on the meter so hasn�t had a lot of use.
I don�t want to pull down the engine unnecessarily.
Has anyone got any thoughts on what might be wrong?
