Kohler Command Engine Missing and Popping

hey everybody this is brad from johnson small engines we have a customers tractor a john deere l-110 this actually has a kohler command engine on it and it came in the shop with a no-start condition and i'm pretty sure i diagnosed it down to a sheared flywheel key which doesn't happen very often but i want to show you guys uh what to look for and this may help the engine that we're working on here is a kohler command 17.5 horsepower motor all right i'm going to give you the um the model inspect really doesn't matter but if you guys ever need to know your model and spec it has a sticker it says model number so it's a cv 491 s and the spec number is a 275 i think that's a zero nine all right um but basically this acquires the all color command engines in the single cylinder version of them uh it has a very strange sound when you try to start it it's kind of like a a popping sound i'm gonna try to make it happen for you guys and we'll see if it makes it all right so that cough that cough right there it's like a backfire and it sounds really like it's gonna try to start but it won't okay so basically right there it's backfiring and it's acting all erratic now everybody's going to have their opinions on what this is and i'm telling you right now we're going to go through it the first thing i did was i changed the spark plug out and that definitely did not it that was not it um the other thing that you guys can look for is underneath the carburetor all right this is what they call a fuel shut off solenoid now this either works or it doesn't work and if you just turn the key to on you'll hear it click it's two person job almost and i'm gonna have the camera get down real close and maybe you'll be able to hear this but i'm gonna turn the key on and off and you listen for it okay i think you guys probably heard that and what that is is it's actually working okay so that's not our issue so the carburetor is definitely not the issue if the carburetor is an issue normally they either will run only on choke because they have a blockage it doesn't have you don't get that pop and miss and sometimes i guess you could but i haven't really in all the years i've been doing this usually carburetor issues come with a will run just with fuel added to the carburetor and you can get it to run and it shuts off after the fuel is gone this one here is getting fuel we have checked all that we checked the spark it has spark and then you you definitely want to check your compression and this one here is pretty straightforward you just come up to the top of the motor and this guy's got really good compression you should be able to turn it over and it's going to be a little tricky to get the piston past top dead center all right so now we're past top dead center piston's coming around gonna go back up the top dead center and we're gonna have compression so right there is top dead center on compression stroke and it's tight so compression's there so then what all right so you know like okay well we got fuel we got spark but it's popping and missing and in my eyes popping and missing is definitely either valves or ignition tools that i'm going to use are right here and i'm going to get back to the spark but i just wanted to show you some of the tools i use an electric ratchet what we need for this job is one your spark plug socket this one here is a i think it's a it is a 5 8 because we're using a 5 8 deep socket for the spark plug comes out of spark plugs to champion our rc12 yc that's an rc12 yc i use ngk which is a different kind um but this is the spark plug that actually came out of it it's an rc 12y6 um for this is a 13 millimeter that we're gonna use we have an eight millimeter socket and a ten millimeter socket i use this this is a this is my fender fender clip tool which uh takes off the booties real well on the spark plugs without ruining the um the boots uh two seven sixteenths wrenches i would definitely recommend disconnecting the battery when you do this job uh we do have a five thirty seconds allen wrench that we need for this job and also i'm using a steering wheel puller i know kohler has its own pullers and sometimes you can even use just a uh a nice size hammer and a pry bar to get the flywheel off which i'm going to show you but i'm also right now we're going to just confirm that we have good spark i'm going to use this tool to get the spark plug boot off and put a spark tester on it which i'm going to grab right now okay so here's my inline spark tester and you can pick it up anywhere there's all different kinds of spark testers this one i use it's just convenient for me to use this type let's go over and check it out that the spark plug boot on the collars they're right in here and people tend to grab them here and if you grab here you can pull off the metal part of the the spark plug wire and it'll stay on the spark plug so i use this tool and i go deep down inside here and i pop it off the spark plug just like that all right and so your metal part that's inside the booty here will stay inside on the wire i can't tell you how many times i've seen people pull this wire and the metal part on the inside the wire will stay on the spark plug and then what you're going to do is i'm going to put my inline spark tester right on the spark plug itself and put the other half in here okay and then we're going to see a spark here now when i crank it over it may backfire but it's also going to show us that we have sparked okay so we have good spark so obviously that's not the problem that spark plug that's in there is actually brand new all right so we're still we still have the issue so we have a backfiring issue all right we got good spark we got the compression the carburetor is fine so what's next all right so here's where i'm going to tell you to disconnect your battery i already have it for the video purposes i'm just going to disconnect the negative and that's why the 2 7 16 i mean some people originally john deere used metric so he had um eight millimeter or ten millimeter bolts in here and through time at least for my customers i put in the 7 16 standard type i'm just gonna take off the battery and then we're going to come over around the other side we'll take off the air cleaner cover and you guys may want to zip through this video a little bit just but right now what i have to do is i have to take off this cover to get to what i'm going to show you may be the issue and we're going to have to take off this cover here which is eight is an eight millimeter here okay you're gonna have to pull this okay pull this down off of your voltage regulator be careful now this guy here has got a weird one it has a 5 32 allen head on it and that's got to come off normally they're eight millimeter but you may or may not have that so i'm just going to take it off with my t-handle and it takes a little bit of time to get this off maybe i can fast forward all this so that's the that's the oddball out now the ottomans are all eight millimeter and ten millimeter i'm just trying to get this off so it doesn't hold down okay so i'm gonna go to my electric ratchet which is a lot easier for me to use being that i was born with one hand this side and then we do have a couple near side okay we have one here which is a eight millimeter and we have an eight mill right here this one you don't have to take out all the way but i'm gonna because you can slide it up over here over that it has a little spot where it just comes right over there now we have to go to 10 millimeter and remember where these go [Music] the real long 10 millimeter bolt goes onto your oil tube and then you have one here [Music] okay and one in the front now that should be everything for this cover so we get this cover off because what we're getting to is being that i'm pretty sure this is out of time we're trying to get to the flywheel key okay and this is your ignition coil which is gonna pass these magnets right here these magnets pass the ignition coil and it tells the spark plug the spark plug wire to ignite at this point so think about this if this if this is out of time then this comes by at the wrong timing spot it's going to throw off the spark even though we have good spark if it's not timed properly we're going to get that kind of backfire and i'm pretty sure what we're going to find is a sheared 50k now this screen housing looks like it's never been off because it has the original clips right here the clips hold down this this is metal clips that hold this down and they're a little tricky to get off right there's one and there's one over here normally they just have these you just pull them up out of their studs here they're plastic and they'll come right off now i don't think you necessarily need these metal clips but if you can push the metal clips back on straighten them out and put them back on and use them again i think i lost one um that'd be great if not they should stay down just by you know pushing right over your plastic tabs it should stay okay once we get that off looks like we got to take these off here and they look like they might be ten or eight i think they're they're an eight millimeter take these off all right so this will come right off and there's the flywheel bolt right here okay so i'm going to take this off now there's a key there's a keyway in here that will time against the crankshaft and if this is sheared this is going to be exactly why this is backfiring and not running correctly so that is a 13 millimeter and if if my thought is correct from the factory if nobody's touched this thing and this is loose let's see if this is loose i'm not even going to use the air gun look at that that wasn't even tight and that's it right there i have not been into this yet and this is the first time into it and this bolt was just hand tight and this is the problem is that being that it was i don't know how it loosened up through time but it did and i'm thinking this may be sheared okay so now you're like okay well how do we get this off well the first thing you got to do is you got to take off your ignition coil because your ignition coil actually will hinder where the it's actually in the way where the teeth are to the flywheel here so you have to take this off now when you put this back on again you're gonna have to line up your magnets here okay there's a gap okay now this gap here between your magnets and the ignition coil itself the little arms right here it's got to be pretty close i usually go between 10 and 13 000 okay and that's basically like a um like uh just a piece of uh well i use a feeler gauge you can use i have made myself a tool to put this back together again as far as getting between ten and thirteen thousands if you look in the book you're going to get a specific setting on it let me get these off real quick eight millimeter bolts that hold your coil on and i just noticed if you guys haven't seen this guess what looks like we had mice and granted if the mice chewed through that that's a ground wire so technically that could be the issue but i don't see any arcing even though it's a ground wire it probably shouldn't arc at all but that could also give you intermittent spark but that wasn't our problem because this is the ground wire but anyway we're going to take this off i'm definitely going to fix that with some heat shrink to get this thing back together again but take the coil out of the way so that now these teeth are not in the way now we have to pull this flywheel all right now that's where i use my puller these are definitely metric it's a metric uh holes here okay and i'm gonna put the bolt back in and i think i'm gonna take the spacer off the washer off of here there's a couple different ways you can get this flywheel off basically the correct way is to use a puller we have a puller to use so we're gonna use a puller you could also use just a hammer and if you be real careful you put the bolt back into the crankshaft and what you can do is you can tap on that bolt but while you're prying up underneath the flywheel you have to be really careful when you pry on a flywheel because you can damage the aluminum housing of the engine so it's not really something you should do but i've done it a lot in my business and it works but what i'm doing here is i'm going to use a puller and when i'm using a puller what i'll do is i'll get it snug tight and then when i get this cranked in i'm not sure what size that is right there yeah it's a 5 8 now i'm going to use a electric impact to tighten this up you can use a wrench oh it came right up how about that that was loose that flywheel was loose basically i just put a little pressure on that puller and it popped the flywheel right up so my my guess is that this sh this is going to have a sheer key and if it has a shared key that's exactly why this engine would not run and it doesn't happen very often but i have noticed that the color commands if you if you have a bolt that is loose on top of the flywheel and that was pretty loose it wasn't tight at all see if we can get this off they're very heavy be i careful see it i know i saw it pop up there it is okay all right so guess what it is sheared because this is where it's supposed to be and the other piece is in here if you can see that you see right down inside there see what yellow mark is you see that keyway in there it's sheared okay so here it is the sheared key so what we have to do is get both of these pieces out put a new keyway in and i'm going to pick them out right now and we'll come back to it at the point of putting a new key in and we'll start from there okay so this is the two pieces the two halves you can see right here it looks like a half a moon when it's together but here's the two pieces okay so i got the one piece out of here which is the crankshaft side and then also ultimately i got it out of here which is the flywheel side and i'll show you on the bench the sheared key right here two pieces go together to make one piece okay so that's the that's the key i know you can you may be able to get one at your local hardware store i'm not sure what this size is or you can go to the parts lookup breakdown and you can use your color spec and model number online and you can look it up to find that part number you can probably order it through kohler not sure if you take this key to the hardware store you're going to be able to match it up to this one here but i do know as a fact that this one here is the oem coming out of the engine so we're going to put this back in sometimes these are a little tricky getting in sometimes i i sanded it to make it a little bit easier for the video purposes you have to tap these in and you do the the moon side which is the half moon side has to go in on the crankshaft so the smooth side is going to be sitting out and that's where you put the flywheel over it so let's go ahead and do that sometimes this is easy sometimes it's hard this one i can tell you can tell when you push these in if they're going to stay or not like sometimes i've actually used i hate to say grease but you got to get these guys to stay so when you push the flywheel over this that these don't push out so you got to go and get it straight in the line i'm going to tap it in a little tiny bit with a hammer not too hard then the tricky part is putting the flywheel lined up over it so it doesn't pop out the bottom and that's the tricky part and then i have to get a flashlight if it actually has set up properly and this one looks like it is perfect and it's in line i'm not sure if the camera can actually see that or not but you can see right down in on there it's a little see if it gets some kind of light on that yeah you may or may not be able to see that the keyway is right down inside there yeah it's a good picture right there okay so now that this is on we want to put the bolt back okay you don't want to over torque it but it's got to be tight all right now once we have this on we want to get the coil wire back on and i am going to fix this wire that the mouse has chewed but i'm not going to do it until after we see if this actually fixes the problem all right so get your bolts in there these are eight millimeter guys all right now what this is how i reinstall this coil is i put the coil on and then i push the coil there's just it's slotted okay so this moves just a little bit okay we got to get a certain gap between the magnet and the armature here coil slash armature same thing okay so i'm going to take a ratchet and tighten it down while it's always pushed back not forward push back i meant forward on the flywheel because some people think ford is going to the engine side but yeah so i'm going to tighten it down to where this armature is away from the flywheel then we put the magnet right in front of it okay now there's a big gap that gap's got to be closed up to a certain degree i actually through the time doing this this is called micro fish and people don't even know what micro fish are anymore but they it's old style the way we used to look at parts and we don't use microfiche anymore but it's perfect if you put them together and you mic them i have this is perfectly set at twelve thousands the gap for twelve thousands through all the years of doing this or all the armatures i've done i've never had a problem with twelve 000 gap in an armature you do have to make sure the magnet gets on both of these to do it properly and stick it down in there then you want to loosen up your magneto which is the coil loosen it up the magnet will actually pull it towards it and it holds it stationary for you because now it's magnetized to it and then you just want to tighten it up and there probably is a torque for this too but as you can see you don't want to over torque in it you don't over torque it and you don't want to leave it loose then i'd pull this out and we should have pretty much the correct gap to give a spark okay now i could put this all back together again and actually i'm gonna because there is a voltage regulator involved which i don't want to have that disconnected from the loop so we're going to put our housing back over this back over that before all right eight millimeter again eight millimeter socket for this okay put this guy back over and you got to be careful here they're actually some of these had a little uh grommet that went up in here i'm not sure why that grommet's not there but you have to push that up inside there someone had grommets some of them didn't or somebody was into this thing and took the ground out but you got to get everything to line up perfect and never tighten up all the bolts until you have this all snugged up you want to put all your bolts back where you have it remember i told you about the long one for the oil tube that's a 10 millimeter we got 10 mm here we have the eight millimeter i kind of left hanging off to the side here these are fine threaded bolts that go into the into the engine block itself the the big 10 millimeter guys don't have that but these little eight millimeter guys are fine thread enable cross thread and a heartbeat and a lot of them actually get rusty through time you just want to make sure you get everybody in before you before you tighten everything up and then we have that allen head what we have to deal with on this other side and this guy here has got to make sure if you have any anything that was connected to these guys like this guy here is a wire uh it's a bracket that helps to keep the wires going the right way make sure now this one's a little tricky here so i'm going to use my wrench to get it started here you connect your voltage regulator connector important for that guy to be connected if you just pull them straight down and off they shouldn't have a problem as far as how you how they go back together you could also mark it with a magic marker so you don't let me get going on tightening them down 28 millimeters first oops okay how much i have to get back under here and fix this this wire that's been chewed on the by the mice anyway this guy here will just pop on okay now i'm not gonna snap it on there because i'm not done with the job yet but just selling just showing you guys to button this up pop this guy back on they'll push down and they will they'll literally snap themselves in place so you don't have to worry about as long as these aren't broken this will this will stay on not a problem we definitely have to put the battery terminal back on so that's why i gotta find the ground okay so keep your battery terminals clean as you can see this guy has it in for service and they're pretty clean make sure they're tight you got to make sure these guys are tight to make sure you have everything properly grounded and prop proper positioning just to make sure you have the best circuitry as far as getting the amperage from the battery to the engine you want to make sure everything is clean and tight this should be buttoned up enough that we should be able to see if this thing will run now my guess is correct this thing should fire up and run all right i just turned it off because we had sparking down here and you got to be careful with your voltage regulator you don't want to have the reason why it's sparked is because this is a ground from the voltage regulator and the voltage regulator is putting out they got ac coming in dc going out uh so you have to make sure this is tight now i should have tightened that down that actually was uh arcing there a little bit i hope i didn't do any damage to the voltage regulator but that entails just checking your bot your uh battery to make sure you have over 14 bolts coming out of it when you're at full throttle and that little drinker will be fine but i just want to i'm actually going to tighten this up right now tight i won't have any worries should not be any arcing up on choke [Applause] okay so there we have it we have a sheared flywheel key doesn't happen very often at all but on the color command engines i have seen this i've actually seen this on briggs stratton engines too but you just got to make sure you check the simple stuff first you check that fuel shutoff solenoid to make sure it's clicking to make sure that's working properly like i said about the carburetor under here usually the carburetors will not operate correctly you'll either get a um a full choke scenario where it will run on full choke that means it has a blockage and as soon as you bring it down off a choke it'll stop this one i knew it ran before it came in the popping and missing is what you have to look for on these the popping and missing gives you it's either a valve issue or it could be just like this it was ignition timing being off just a hair i mean a little teeny bit i'm not sure exactly how far that fly will sheared but the magnets were not coming across the magneto and the right timing and so the spark was not sparking when it should giving you the popping and missing i hope this video helped a lot of people out there i know is kind of a little bit rushed in there is definitely a uh a torque on the flywheel bolt that you have to make sure you do correctly and also the the armature has a torch on them i don't usually torque them at all and we go back and torque these on that bolt for the for the crankshaft itself if you all like the video please give it a thumbs up i appreciate everybody watching my videos please subscribe and thanks for watching

Channel: Johnson's Small Engines

Views: 110,285

Keywords: John Deere, Popping and missing, How to, Diagnose, Kohler command, 12, 13, 14, 15, 15.5, 16, 17, 17.5, Horse power, HP, L series, D series, Husqvarna, Craftsman, Sears, Toro, MTD, Cub Cadet, flywheel key, sheard, repair

Id: xSv4UziFh0o

Length: 26min 42sec (1602 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 17 2021