I'm relatively mechanically capable but my experience lies predominantly with motorcycles.
The lawn mower is a Craftsman DY4500 with a B&S 24hp Intek motor. The mower is a buddies I'm trying to help get running correctly.
Symptoms:
Mower will start with choke and initially run correctly.
After a short period of time running the mower will begin to rev down and back up on it's own. This occurs regardless of throttle position. Looking underneath the carb I can see a vertical linkage moving up and down at the same time the engine revs change. Under load while driving with deck engaged the symptoms are exaggerated even more.
What I've done so far:
Before noticing the correlating linkage movement I went through the mower completely.
Air filter clean and free. Spark plugs clean and firing cleanly. Fuel clean and fresh.
Fuel flow through the filter didn't look very good (compared to what I'm used to). The fuel pump was replaced suspecting the issue to be insufficient fuel flow. Filter clean.
I noticed what the manual told me to be a fuel cutoff gadget (technical term) attached to the carb bowl and connected to a 2 wire harness. I tried running the mower with that disconnected and saw no change in symptoms, so I plugged it back in.
What would make the mower rev up and down on it's own??? Where to go from here?
Thanks for any advice or direction anyone can offer.