Tuesday, May 19, 2020

Troubleshoot & Tune Up GCV160 Honda engine on Toro lawnmower

Dusting off my mad skills from the small engine class I took with Eric a few years back :)

Friend had a mower dying after running a couple minutes.

So I figured I'd check the oil, plug, air filter, carb while working my way over to the fuel...

Oil looked good, plug was excellent, OH HOLY HELL that's not what an air box inside of the air filter should look like! While I don't expect a small engine cleaner box to be pristine, there shouldn't be an obvious build up of dirt:

Looks like they put the wrong filter on at the factory:

Easy fix, new filter that fits properly:

As to the chief complaint, I checked that the gas tank was almost but not quite empty. Took the hose off the intake side of the shutoff...well that should be free flowing:

And taking the line off the tank it is free flowing...so it's either the filter (which is obviously dirty) or the hose itself is plugged.


Thought of replacing the Honda internal filter with a generic external filter, but it doesn't fit well:


So since I couldn't find a new filter locally, and Corona virus has delivery schedules all screwy, I just used carb cleaner to clean the existing filter and re-installed it. Also upgraded the spring hose clips:

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