Before I got rid of my last rusted Rover Ranger I was contemplating fixing it and it also needed a new friction drive.
I found someone I know that had a friction drive pulley in his shed on a horizontal shaft engine driving an air compressor ,I was going to swap 3 impulse starters for the friction drive and he wanted the old pulley to put back on the compressor ,I'm guessing it will still be on the compressor ,he'd probably take 3 early alloy victa starters too if impulse starters can't be found ,it wouldn't take me long to look into that if your interested.
The other option would be to fit a small gearbox with forward and reverse from another mower ,I've seen them on a few different brands of mowers the one below I removed from a MTD ,decades ago when vertical shaft ride on mowers were hard to come by at a cheap price, I converted a ride on to a horizontal shaft engine and used the same gearbox on it's side. just had to make mounting brackets, not that you would need to turn the gearbox on it's side or use a horizontal motor.
