Questioning Admirer: You say that you love to take things apart to see how they work. What does that mean?
QA, I'm so glad that you asked that as I have a great example of what I mean queued up with photos! The rain has let up here in SF recently and I decided to take advantage of the nice weather and cut the over grown lawn. The problem is that my mower refused to start. Well, I've never worked on a mower before but I'm sure it must be simple. New plugs, gas and an air filter later with the same result. Slight backfire and random putting. A Google search points to 3 possible culprits: 1) fouled carb 2) bent key pin 3) stuck valves
OK, this is what I was talking about. Time to roll up my sleeves and see what I can break. Let's pull apart the engine, ye-haw!! Carb seemed OK. Nothing obviously gummed up. Put that back together. Took the pulley off the top and realized that option 2 had a real chance of getting ugly. Back up. Think about this for a second. Skip to option 3 as it has a lesser chance of destroying the mower and if I don't find anything, go back to 2. Pulled the head off and saw the large intake valve open, spin the engine and it doesn't close. That's it, stuck intake valve! Some taps with the persuader... I mean hammer, lots of WD40, scraping carbon off and spinning the engine. Button it all back up and things are peachy. Check out the photos of the operation below. Fascinating
So come to think of it, this answers two questions. The taking things apart question (see above) and what do I do in my spare time = not very much
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