Kohler Command Blown Head Gasket Repair

okay so I don't know how well that shows up but that is exhaust smoke I believe coming out of the oil dipstick this tractor I recently fixed it was not running needed a new ignition coil spark plug fuel system carburetor and a drive pulley anyway it drives and runs pretty well but it is a little hard to start and it does sound a little bit loud when shutting it down you can hear that compression escaping so I'm going to uh pull the head off and put a new gasket on okay so first things first I'm gonna get this foot off just to get better access to the engine as well as give you guys a better view a lot of machines like my Husqvarna here you can just tilt the hood open and lift the hood right off without any tools in this case it's a little bit different there's actually a bowl here and one underneath so two bolts on each side and then once those are removed this hood will just come right off okay so now the fun begins we need to start peeling layers off so that we can get to the head basically everything that's attached to the head needs to come off so that's you know the intake side the carburetor the exhaust the tins you know the wires the hoses the cover the rockers and eventually the head all right I got to put you down for this one all right getting this cover off can be a bit messy there is a lot of oil sometimes in these covers okay so it looks like it's gonna be a half-inch socket to get these bolts out just one thing to note I think what happened here when I initially kind of saved for this machine I had cleaned out you know taking this off or cleaned out the cooling fins they were all jam-packed with grass clippings so this engine was not cooling properly and what happens over time is it overheats and then it cools down overheats cools down repeats that cycle stretching out these bolts and what eventually happens is the head gasket blows so that's probably what happened here so it is important to check your cooling fins I mean these are air-cooled engines if the air can't get through the fins then you're gonna have trouble Wow so this bottom right bolt had basically no torque on it and this bottom one was not much better this one was very tight the top and this top right I haven't been able to get off yet so I think what we're going to see is if it's if the gasket is blown it's probably blown more on the bottom guess we'll find out yes bottom right one has a space there so make sure that one goes back in the right spot okay and all the others are the same size so theoretically this head is free to come off now I'm just going to whack it a few times with a mallet and see if we can't get it off okay all right so I think you can see here we had a couple blowouts this is the one I suspected going basically from the cylinder over to the crank case where the push rods are what I was not aware of was down here looks like it blew out in two spots heading down you can't kind of see here on the aluminum how black it is that's what the exhaust smoke was hitting it and that's something I couldn't see when I when I actually took this apart to clean the cooling fins you know I noted that it looks nice and clean although full of grass but no exhaust skid marks what I did not do was pull this tin off down here that was covering the exhaust you know and that I might have been able to look up and see that yeah there was a lot of exhaust coming out of the bottom so I don't know what the compression was on this thing but it definitely was not running at its full potential with all these leaves so I want to get this cleaned up and then we'll just put it back together and see how it drives okay I don't know if you can see that but this is the exhaust gasket you can see it's blown out on the side those probably know the reason why it was kind of loud you know I think between all the compression and exhaust escaping around here it was really making a lot of noises of compression loss anyway I'm not going to rush and put this back together I'm just going to clean this up get a new exhaust gasket ordered and that will close this thing back up okay so we got the the gasket for the exhaust as well as the new head gasket here everything's pretty well cleaned off you know I wouldn't say it's a hundred percent perfect but you know in this case it's a lot better than what it was so I think we're ready to proceed and get this thing back together the only thing I did kind of off-camera here is I do loosen up the exhaust a little bit so what I want to do is you know I've got to put the head on while getting the exhaustive at the same time and then when I tighten the exhaust stuff I want to make sure it's making a good solid connection to that head so I took the spark plug out I just want to rotate the engine make sure here any anything hitting that sounds good I don't know if I mentioned this before but um this is a Kohler CB 15s engine and it was very easy to find the service manual online you know usually it's a struggle to find out what these torque values are but the service manual is excellent you know so that really says something I think about this company and it's easy to read anyway it does have the torque settings for the exhaust so it's 216 inch pounds I know my torque wrench is not that precise but it at least gives me something to aim for and you know so I'm going to proceed to tighten the exhaust appropriately and you know what the manual will be able to torque everything the way that it was meant you okay and for this engine you're supposed to just using our TV sealant on the cap so I've put that on let it set up for a few minutes and I think we're ready to both cover back on okay mechanically it's all back together I just need to put the hood on and try starting it okay I think we're ready to drive I did get a little oil on the exhaust so there might be a little bit of smoke burning off but hopefully not too much [Music] okay not bad for a 20 year old tractor so anyway I think we're done here I hope this helps someone thanks for watching

Channel: James Condon

Views: 43,723

Rating: 4.9155674 out of 5

Keywords: Blown Head Gasket, CV15s, Exhaust Leak, Fix, Head Gasket, John Deere, Kohler Command, Kohler, LT155, Low Compression, Repair, Small Engine, Troubleshooting

Id: NAdHH30yVWM

Length: 19min 12sec (1152 seconds)

Published: Thu Sep 26 2019