Generator Surging and Stalling Under Load - Running Lean?

hey guys welcome back so today i brought home this 1400 watt all power generator and this is a tiny little generator it has a 98 cc 3 horsepower engine and i found this one on craigslist it was only 50 and according to the listing the fuel in the tank is bad and the engine won't start so before buying it i only checked two things you know first the tank and i want to make sure it wasn't rusted out and it's actually not bad there's no rust that i could see and the fuel although it is old and smells a bit off it's not terrible and i don't see any rust on the bottom of the tank so i don't think we have an issue there and the engine has compression so i think this will be an easy fix at least that's my hope so let me get set up a little bit better i want to check the oil real quick and then just try starting it as is and then we'll go from there yeah not too bad there's plenty of oil might be a little bit closer on the low side but it is nice and clean and i think it's fine for testing we get nothing i'm just gonna try a bit of starting fluid see if it'll start i plugged in the light and turned it on i just want to see that not only does the engine run but does that generator head work beautiful so we just need to fix the fuel and we should be good before i pull the carb off i am going to crack the drain and just see what's in that carburetor i just shut the fuel off so this tells me a lot actually it tells me that the fuel valve works there's no obstructions and the needle and seat work so the fact that this isn't running it's either due to water or most likely a clog to chat doesn't look that bad there's no water in there minimal debris so i think we just have a clogged jet so let's get that carb off and take a look you [Music] you yuck it's not too good but it should clean up that's just a lot of varnish and that jet the main jet is plugged solid so a little bit of uh time in the ultrasonic it should clean this right up this is the pilot jet on top in the main jet the emulsion tube on this one i'm not sure it's removable there's really no place to there's no slot to get a screwdriver in there so potentially it's just a push fit see if i can get it to move but i don't want to force it and this i don't know if that's normal oh yeah that's fine no don't want to force it the main jet is definitely a problem the emulsion tube i don't know if it's a problem but if i keep pushing it it's gonna be so i'm gonna spray this out a bit with some carb cleaner and spray up through the emulsion tube then we'll let this soak just using this drill bit set not to drill the jet out but to scrape all the junk out so just trying to find the largest bit or the last one that fits and use that to clean the jet so seems to be a number 70. that should be good and then the pilot jet it's probably going to be one of these small ones over here and that was a 79 it's coming along pretty well it is going to need a little bit more time so i'll run that through maybe two more times and while doing that i'm going to get that fuel out of the tank thankfully there wasn't too much in there this tank is only about one and a half gallons and i'd say about half that came out so as bad as this fuel is there is no water in it it goes through the filter just fine so this should be okay to burn in the car as long as it's mixed with a bunch of fresh stuff yeah cleaned up pretty well so let's get this back together this is the idle set screw this generator doesn't idle so it's really not needed just make sure you don't drive it in so far that it actually influences the position of the throttle plate or even worse if you drive it all the way in it's going to hold the plate open quite a bit and the generator might over rev without a load you that should do it do i hate it when manufacturers do that a lot of times they put the engine just too close to the frame anyway i got it off somehow so hopefully i can get it back on without breaking it you okay good it started right up and the engine speed was fairly steady so i think we're all set as far as the carb goes i'm just going to top off that oil just clean some of the dust off and then i want to bring it outside let it warm up a bit and push this right to the limit see if it can deliver the 1400 watts as advertised [Music] [Music] oh um not sure what happened things were running pretty well and then it started surging and even choking it didn't seem to matter so potentially a piece of junk got in the carb not really sure but i'm going to drain the bowl just try starting it again plenty of fuel in that bowl and it looks fairly clean i do see a little little bit of debris down there but not much at all anyway i turn the fuel back on i'm gonna start it one more time just make sure there's no change unfortunately there's no change it's still surging so i'm going to pause it here just go through that carb again and resume in a second cleaning that carb a second time made no difference the engine started pretty easily it sounded good at first but then started surging without a load and nothing would really get it to stop except applying a bit of choke or a 750 watt load so the pilot jet the pilot circuit is definitely an issue now i could pull the car off try to drill it out and that might improve things but there's another issue with the carb there is an adjustment screw on the side and when taking the carburetor apart i tried getting that screw to turn and unfortunately it broke off you can just see it right there so even cleaning this again or drilling out the pilot jet you know it's still going to have a restriction because i can't make that fine adjustment so i already took a look on amazon these carbs are about 14 so i'm going to go ahead and order one of those and we'll try this again the new carbs been ordered it's going to take a couple weeks to get here so i haven't completely given up yet on this carb i obviously took it apart again nothing too obvious but this pilot jet when going through it with the micro drill bits it did feel like there was a decent amount of plaque buildup kind of along the wall so i've scraped all that off that is definitely cleaner at this point next i'm going to try to free up this jet here i'm just going to get the dremel out try cutting a slot there something that i can get a screwdriver on and potentially use that to break that free um [Music] hmm nope it just broke off the side so there's not too much hope for that i'm just going to use some vice grips and hope for the best although the jet the tip of the jet survived the rest of it not in very good shape and this carb it's not one you can really buy parts for so i don't think it makes sense to even try but with that said this is a honda clone and i do have a couple honda carbs this one here is from an eu 2000 and this jet here may potentially fit i also have i think a carb from an ex-1000 a honda ex1000 so let me find that we'll take a look at those jets and see if either one will fit actually this one is for the eu 2000 or the eu 1000 but this jet is not removable so this one that was from the ex 1000 so let's give this jet a try the ex1000 is a very similar size engine so potentially this will work they are a bit different let's see yeah that might work you can just see the tip of the needle poking out right there so i'd say there's a chance still with this carb and to give it the best chance possible i pulled my new ultrasonic out this one i actually got a few months ago it's been sitting on a shelf because my old one the one i've been using for years is sounding a little sick and i don't think it's going to last much longer so besides being twice the size it's also three times more powerful it has three transducers in it so that hopefully will make the difference on this carb so what do you think third time's a charm not so sure but i've got the carb bolted back on no air box this time let's get it started and see if there's any change [Music] it's even worse let's try it again [Music] [Music] [Music] so [Music] okay well progress definitely progress but i had to turn that jet out quite a bit i started at one turnout i'm now at least four or five turns out it's kind of hard to tell and in fact it's so far out that the jet is loose and the spring isn't even making contact anymore with that jet so it's just kind of spinning in the body of the carburetor so that's really not usable like that so i'm just going to wait turn you back on in a second with the new carb installed new carbs installed the old one has been pulled off so i've set that pilot jet at one turnout let's get it started and see if there's a new result [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] okay that was a little disappointing 750 watts this engine fell on its face three times in a row so either the engine is down on power or the load is just too much at once and it can't react fast enough so i'm not sure which it is so i'm going to break out the variac we'll bring up the voltage slowly and see how high we can get the wattage before things start to buckle [Music] this one's fighting me it cannot support a 750 watt load unless i give it some choke and then it can do it without issue when running on the variac i was able to get it to 1200 watts close to 1300 watts before things would start to buckle and go to surge but even when bringing the variac voltage up bringing the wattage up i noticed the engine was surging again between you know zero and 500 watts so it was running lean kind of on the light load side of things and that might explain why it's stalling when i go from zero to 750. i think it's relying a lot on that pilot circuit and it's just too lean you know right now i have that screw turned out three full turns and that's too much so that jet i think it needs to be drilled out so i'm going to remove the jet bring it inside open it up a bit and put it back [Music] looks like we're through so let's give this a try [Music] [Applause] drilling out the pilot jet made no noticeable difference so i'm going to pause it here pull the main jet drill that out and try it again [Music] [Music] so finally i get 1400 watts out of this generator i didn't think i was going to get there these little generators tend to over promise and under delivering and this one was definitely under delivering and i wasn't sure if it was the carb the fact that it was you know had old fuel in it and maybe i wasn't cleaning it out well enough but even the new carb was struggling you know i had to drill both the jets out i will leave the drill bit sizes in the description in case you need to do the same and now that that's done it's running pretty well i wouldn't say perfect it's still oscillating a bit under load but it does work itself out and the engine speed is high but these little generators usually they are set from the factory at about 63 and a half hertz so i think i'm going to leave good enough alone now the interesting thing is a few weeks back i did get an email from a subscriber he has a sportsman gen 2000 it's essentially this generator just rebranded and he was having similar issues his was surging without a load except his carburetor did not have that needle so he ended up buying a new carb with the needle and he was able to sort that issue out but under load he can only pull about 900 watts before the engine starts struggling and even with the new carb there was really no change and he dug a little bit further and actually noticed on his generator he had a circuit breaker rated at 8.5 amps which is a thousand watts so it would seem like the manufacturer knew that it couldn't do 1400 based on that circuit breaker anyway this one it doesn't say what the circuit breaker is rated at so i went to all power site and they say on their site that this can do 20 amps which is not true this can only do 11.6 amps i think what they meant to say was it had a 20 amp outlet why i don't know because it cannot put out 20 amps anyway this is now a good running generator and this i would say is done you know aside from the air box but you've already seen how that's installed i'm not going to torture you by showing you that again so i hope this video helps someone thanks for watching

Channel: James Condon

Views: 92,687

Keywords: 98cc, APG, APG3014, All Power, Bad Gas, Bad Petrol, Bas Gasoline, Carburetor Cleaning, Carburetor Install, Clone Carburetor, Dill Carburetor Jet, Dirty Carburetor, Fixed, GEN2000, Generator, Honda Clone, Increase Jet Size, Jet Size, Load Test, Main Jet, Pilot Jet, Small Engine, Sportsman, Stalling Under Load, Stalling, Surging, Troubleshooting

Id: 8K8MispZueI

Length: 42min 15sec (2535 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 14 2022