The SnowKing

 Built by Tecumseh Power Products, and used on a big MTD Snowflight 826 2-stage Snowblower, it's a monster of an engine!
The first time I heard it fire up and run, I said... "WOW! That thing is loud!"
Maybe because I'm standing right behind the muffler, but I'm pretty sure it's actually really bloody loud. I do like the sound of the engine, and I do like how loud it is... but I can't deny that it's likely at a hearing damage level. I mean, it sounds close to that of a motorcycle.. But not quite.

The 826 means it's a 8 Horsepower engine, with a 26" clearing path. So it's a pretty big snowblower, but I am thinking it might be a little too much snowblower at times! 

It was nice to have, when we got the big dumping of snow recently, and boy did it chew thru the snow! Made short work of the small mound the plow had dumped there.
It's not as bad as one year when we had a near 3 foot tall wall in front of our drive because of a plow.. That was a terrible snowfall! 

Could have done with the big snowblower then, it would have enjoyed that.  I had a single stage snowblower, but it was battery powered. Talk about useless! it would often cut out while clearing snow, and was useless in anything but powder. Add a bit of slush to the mix, nope... wouldn't do anything, just clog.  Add ice, and it would stop.  Heck, it would stop on powder too.  Terrible, was happy when I sold it, as I was done with the Battery Powered experiment, and found it to be lacking a lot.  The lawnmower was junk, and the snowblower could barely blow snow.

This Snowflight snowblower, well, it lives up to its name! It blows snow, and it makes the snow fly away!  

It's hard to believe that it was towards the end of summer that I thought to myself, it's time to get the snowblower ready... and not until October that I actually got around to it.
Sure enough, a quick carb clean and the Snowflight was back in action!

Now funny story.. I was out using it not too long ago, no before the large snowfall, just to get the hang of it, and understand how it works. WELL, the tire chain came off and got sucked up into the chute... Stalled the engine, as expected it would, and the chain got all tangled in the auger. Blah!  I was worried I had sheared the key, so I started it up, and it ran fine... Thank goodness! 
Shut it down, did my best to get the chain off, and out of the auger, but nope... Out came the grinder, and goodbye chain...
I decided to take the other tire chain off, don't need a repeat, and those chains were pretty toast.
Funny, because it has loads of traction! Enough that it does a wheelie when I engage the transmission.

It's a great snowblower, and one I would highly recommend to others.  Sure, it's a Tecumseh engine, but they are really good snowblower engines! The King of Snow, after all...

Alright guys,

Chat soon...

What's The Backstory On The Lawnmower With The Missing Carburetor

 Ah, the missing carburetor was such a funny video. It wasn't so much that the carburetor was missing, as it had the bowl nut snapped off inside the carburetor. But, when I originally got the lawnmower, I didn't know. I actually thought the bowl nut was just simply missing entirely, not that it was there, it was completely missing, because it likely was thrown away.

When we found it, it was with another mower, however the other mower was basically an engine & Parts donor, which we happily took.

The hilarious part of it all, the mower was actually in really good condition overall, other than the rear height adjustments were completely rusted, and frozen.  The front I managed to free up, but aside from that, the actual mower itself was in decent condition. The deck was solid, the engine seemed to be fairly well maintained, and even the blade was good.
It was a real conundrum. I mean, especially since the carburetor can be had for under $25 on scAmazon, such as this one right here.

It honestly is a pretty good little mower, with a lot of power.
I really found this to be a fun repair. 
It also was such a good little mower, that I kept it for a good long while, using it as my own mower for a fair bit of time, before finally selling it.  The easy start, and 6.0HP engine on it made it an easy sell, plus when they saw how absolutely easy it was to push with those big goofy wheels, it pretty much sold itself.

The carb wasn't so much missing, more that it just had no bowl nut, or as it's known as on these engines, the main jet. 
It was a really simple repair, honestly, just a replacement carburetor.
However, because I'm me, I thought I'd attempt to rescue this carb, try a different jet from another failed carb...
THAT'S when I found this doozy of a gremlin...

Yeah, I discovered what happened to this mower, and why it was tossed to the side.
The nut had snapped inside the carb.
It's finished, unfortunately..
I attempted to drill it out, and it just did not go well at all.
Sure, I got all the way thru the remnants of the jet, but it was destroyed.
I tossed it into the scrap heap.

I replaced the carburetor with one that I cleaned up off a mower that I replaced the carb on, which made more sense at the time.
I had a new carburetor ready, in case I needed it. But I made sure to be thorough in the cleaning.

After reinstalling the carburetor on the mower, wow did it mow a treat! As I said previously. I was so pleased with the cutting it gave that I kept it for quite some time.  I wanted to make sure that this 35 year old beast still had it in her to keep on going!

Just an all around solid mower, really well built. I am always impressed with these Craftsman products. However the new mowers, after Sears liquidated, that are made by MTD, don't be fooled by those imposters. They're not Craftsman mowers, they're just more department store Chinesieum junk.

This one, it could have used new adjusters, and a deck resurfacing, but for what it is, if it is continued to be well maintained, I could see it lasting another decade or two...

As I was saying about liking it a lot, it was more than that honestly.
The mower was probably one of my favorite mowers to work on so far. It sounded good, it seemed to always want to run, and... I kind of like the fact that I was getting a nearly 40 year old mower back into service.

I hope to get a much older mower back into service one day. That would be a lot of fun!

Anyway guys,

Chat soon!

Blog Posts Are Planned To Post Twice a Week. 
Every Thursday & Sunday Going Forward

The Mystery Of The Lost Lawnmower Engine

 My eldest son found this Lawnmower Engine in the forest where he, and a few of his friends would hang out.  What a surprise to find out what type of engine it was.

Yep, of course it's a Tecumseh Engine! It likely will never run again, but it'll be fun to crack into it, and see what happened, or if it was just an act of blatant littering? 
What a riot! I had so much fun making this video, but things went sideways in a real hurry.  When the first bolt snapped, I wasn't at all upset by it, but when my Philips tip snapped off, I was just a little surprised.. It was new, and Milwaukee.  Maybe because it was in a DeWalt impact? Kind of like when you have a Toyota, and you accidentally park Next to a Dodge, and suddenly end up with electrical problems... Get that Premature Electrical Failure, typical of Dodge..

The funny thing about this, is as soon as he brought it home, I said.. "I have to make an imitation "Restoration" video with this thing.  
So I decided to take it, my son included, into the forest, and low and behold, there's a mound of freshly cut grass in the middle of the forest. WHAT a perfect spot to make the plant, and pretend that we just randomly found a Lawnmower engine near a large mound of freshly mowed grass. The funniest thing is that the mound of grass was entirely random! We had nothing to do with that, it was just pure coincidence. Like the Matrix meant it to happen that way. Almost as if you don't really have any actual real decisions in life, and it's all preordained. 

As for the tear down, which originally was not going to BE a Tear Down. I was hoping to do an actual, maybe, Restoration Video, see if I could get this engine running, or if there were any viable parts..

Unfortunately, there really weren't many. I mean, the valves weren't terrible, but they may be very badly pitted, however they seemed more caked in carbon, and oil... 

As you can see in this photo, there is a lot of stuck on crud all over the springs. This seems to have, for the most part, protected the metal from the elements.  
It was strange how some elements of the engine were just beyond redemption, while others were almost preserved.
The coil, as you'll see in another photo, was a total loss, at least I'm thinking it will be. It is pretty badly rusted, and I don't think it survived being in the elements for, at least I'm thinking a decade or more.

As you can see with the valves, they don't look terrible, but they are definitely showing visible signs of rust, and likely have pitting. But the only way to really know, will be to clean them up.

Afterwards, I'm not really sure what I'm going to do with them. I don't know about reusing them in any Tecumseh engine, as I have several other ones that are in significantly better condition than these ones, but again.. They're not cleaned up, and they might come out really good.
Only thing I can do is clean them up..

The spark plug, well, that's another story altogether. I honestly think it'll still work, I'm also really, 100%, going to try it out in an upcoming video. 
I torched it off to see if there is any hope in getting it going.. I really do believe it'll create fire. 
Just hoping I don't get called out by it hahaha!

Certainly wouldn't be the first time that's happened to me.  Gone to start a mower, and .... yeah, didn't happen. Why? Oh, well, I mean, my videos are all 

"Brought To You By
A Forgotten Spark
Plug Wire"

So it's not all that uncommon for me to completely forget to reattach the spark plug wire.

Taking off the flywheel was another ordeal, and one that I'm glad I've started using my air-hammer to get off. It makes life a lot easier. No smashing the crankshaft with a hammer, just get the air chisel out, and give it a quick "Brrrt"
Off it comes! It's quite the treat to do. If you don't have an air-hammer, they're inexpensive, unless you don't have a compressor. 
If you have a battery drill, like a DeWalt, or Milwaukee, Metabo, Makita, etc, you can pick up a cheap second hand Rotary Hammer Drill, but make sure it has the "Chipping" action, get a chipping pin, and use that, it'll do the same thing.

This part here, the flywheel, even the starter cup, is probably one of the actual useful parts that I got from this.  
I'm pretty impressed with how well preserved the cup is, considering..
The flywheel, being aluminum, I'm not surprised took the weathering a fair bit better.
And as for the magnets, well.. They're still magnets.







The one thing that I thought was absolutely bizarre, was the head. Part of the head had rotted away, to the point that it likely would have caused a major head gasket leak.
While removing the head bolds, only one broke believe it or not, while I was removing them, the head started to come away before I had removed the last bolt.
That was concerning... very concerning, because now the head is completely useless as well.

What the heck happened to this engine?? I wonder what trauma it caused when it died to get tossed into a forest?

The PCV Valve was completely shot, the sponge filter had entirely deteriorated into a clump.
It was all over for that part... and that's when I saw that the engine still had, what looked like, a black, grey, sludge... Turns out it was mostly water, but did have a little bit of oil still in it.

And since there were no holes in the block, and the piston was at the bottom of the bore, with both the valves closed, and that was probably all that was left of the oil that was in that machine.

When I saw the journals on that Connecting Rod, and how scored they were, I knew what happened.

It was run low on oil, causing the bearings to overheat, and the connecting rod just blew apart
Total disaster.
I was hoping to get some kind of movement out of the engine, but it is entirely locked up. Even after removing the connecting rod pieces, the engine does not budge.
I tried with a pair of grips on the crank, and attempted to turn it, but nothing... It is completely stuck.

Rod McNuggets, which fell out of the engine

You can see the governor gear, which still looks like it'll function.

The bottom of the crankshaft can be seen here, and it's very rusted

A collection of the parts removed from the engine

It really is amazing how often you see engines run low on oil. Whether they're $20k+ cars, or lawn mowers.. They all need lubrication.
Not too much oil, but never too little. Too little, and this is what happens. They seize up, and are destroyed.
They are incredible marvels of engineering, and have driven our entire world forward to what it is today.
It's amazing how easily so many governments are willing to just throw that all away for apparently "Green" initiatives (meaning forcing more consumerism, and throwing away more things)..

I am trying to come up with an idea of what to do with this engine now that I have it, as I don't want to scrap it. I kind of want to keep it, maybe use the the parts to make some 

"S-Crap P-Arts" heh...

If anything happens with it, I'll definitely be updating in a new post.

Thanks for reading!

Chat soon!