Well, I’ve been tinkering for about three days now, and it’s back to running like a top. I was extremely cautious in documenting the sequence of events that brought me to this point so that I could lay them out for Briank and others that are having auger problems, so here goes:
Starting and Tuning an Auger Powerhead
1. Entertain a fantasy that you can just dump some fresh gas in and give it a pull. This is an important part, for reasons which will become obvious later.
2. Oh what the heck, give it a try. Fresh gas, choke on, pull pull pull….. pull pull pull…. pull pull pull….
3. Cuss. Drain gas back into can. Be sure to dump as much as possible on your hands and wooden workbenches in the garage. If you can get it on your clothing feel free to do so, especially if you haven’t bothered to change out of your work clothes (told you that gas would be important later).
4. Pull the spark plug. It should look black and gummy (well, it shouldn’t, but it probably will anyway). If there’s gas on it, that’s an added bonus, but don’t expect it the first few times you do this. Clean it up as best you can, knowing it probably won’t do any good.
5. Put the wire on the end of the plug. Find someone who doesn’t like you and have them hold it against the engine block while you give the starter a yank. This only works once, so you’ll have to find someone new every year. If they twinge and jump, then drop the plug and curse you in a voice loud enough to wake up neighbor kids two blocks away, you’ve got a good spark.
6. Replace the plug and flip the choke back on. Pull pull pull…. pull pull pull… pull pull pull…. Curse the auger. Pull pull pull. Resolve yourself that it’s a carb problem and prepare to enter a bottomless pit of woe. Nothing is harder to understand or worse to tune than those tiny carbs.
7. Dump some gas in the carb throat. Pull pull Vroooooommmmmmmmm… put.. put… dead. Cuss.
8. Repeat step 7 until you’re sure it’s never going to pull gas on its own. Cuss some more.
9. Tear the carb apart, piece by piece. Be sure to yell “Oh S***” every time springs fly off and pieces get lost. Crawl around on your hands and knees in the garage looking for miniaturized hardware praying that it’ll still run without it. Hopefully there’s enough dirt and filth on your garage floor that those gas-soaked work clothes that you were wearing are now going straight into the trash when you get done.
10. Look at the pieces and wonder in amazement how it ever worked. What’s this? A gasket that only covers half the hole? No, it’s not damaged, some engineer at Tecumseh made it that way on purpose. It must flap back and forth and… well… what were they thinking???
11. Entertain a brief fantasy about choking the first mechanical engineer you come across after getting this back together.
12. Put the pieces back together, but be sure not to replace or change anything unless it’s damaged (note, the damage was most likely your fault during the disasembly/reassembly process).
13. Yank the pull starter. It now starts and runs as well as it ever did, mostly due to the prolific yelling and cursing that you have been performing throughout the operation. You did nothing that you’re aware of other than take it apart and put it back together, so that must’ve been it.
14. Be sure to start it every few hours to be sure it’s still going to run when you hit the ice. COntinue this practice until the neighbors call the cops.
15. Miller time. Go to bed.
Where the hell were you when I was doing radio engineering work? Sure would’ve made those overnight maintenance shifts a blast. You’re right the cussing part is vital, had a lawn tractor carb that acted the same way for a month a couple of years ago… but that’s another story. Thanks for the insight 