Powermate Generator Flooding and Tecumseh Governor Surging - Fixed

hey guys welcome back so today i brought home this coleman powermate generator it's powered by an 11 horse tecumseh engine and like most things i bring home this thing doesn't work but that's okay because it was only listed at ninety five dollars and the person selling it proceeded to talk himself down to sixty dollars so i wasn't going to argue with that worst case it's well worth it in parts but i don't think it's going to come to that when picking it up the person selling it did try to start it for me we got nothing from the engine but i could tell the compression seemed good most likely we're dealing with a carburetor problem potentially spark or timing but my money would be on the carburetor once i got it in the garage i checked the fuel tank and was kind of surprised at what i saw there's no fuel in the tank maybe this generator works and doesn't need the carb cleaned i kind of doubt it but it's wishful thinking anyway the tire like this is causing this whole thing to kind of tilt to the front and sideways and there is actually some fuel in the tank not a lot but it's all kind of gone to the front left corner and can't make it to the fuel outlet which is on this side of the tank so i want to get this tire fixed up we'll check the oil and if everything looks good we'll just try the easy thing we'll put some more gas in there bring it outside pull the cord and see what happens this hub's pretty dirty so i'm just going to clean it up a little bit [Music] i'm actually surprised that this tire inflated there are a lot of fine cracks on the wall here and you can see there are some areas where there's just little bits of air making bubbles so you know this tire probably isn't going to stay inflated for too long i do have a little bit of slime i can throw in here so i think i'm just going to pull the valve slime this tire inflate it and just give it a few days see if it recovers yeah so about eight ounces for a little tire like this this okay i wish i'd noticed that a little bit sooner but this is not the right tire for this the bolt here is a 3 8 inch bolt and i'd say the diameter of this tire shaft is probably 5 8 not even the right size so i do have some a set of tires from another power mate they are the 3 8 inch which is what's needed here now they're not pneumatic tires they're the never flat ones but that's probably better anyway so let me get these tires off and put the right size ones on yeah not not quite as nice looking wouldn't have been my first choice but they fit on there the way they should so i can come back to this later assuming the rest of it comes back throw a little bit of paint on that and uh you know clean the rest of the machine up you okay well it doesn't look too oily it actually looks pretty looks wet to right about there and the full mark is down here so smells like gas yeah so that the oil has to be drained so so yeah it's a lot better maybe a touch over full but pretty close well it's probably a good thing the person selling this couldn't get it started i'd say more than half of what came out was fuel and not oil and that would not have done the engine any favors running you know with half fuel in half oil inside the crank anyway it's all fixed now and as if there was any doubt i am going to have to go into that carb but i still want to bring it outside see if it'll start as is and if it does we'll validate quickly if there's power output and this is something that could easily be avoided i mean this is a gravity-fed system so there's always going to be pressure from the tank pushing on that needle and seat and if there's any imperfection or a piece of little piece of dirt that'll hold the valve slightly open and do what we saw and this is something that could have taken months or years to get to this point so you know simple thing like shutting off the fuel valve would have avoided this or even better drain the tank run the carb dry so let's get this outside see if it shows any signs of life and yes i did check the throttle linkage surprisingly it's not frozen up that's a fairly common problem especially when the fuel is leaking past the needle but in this case it's not stuck so it should be safe to start i guess the only other observation here is that someone has put electrical tape on the breather hose and it does seem a little bit restrictive down here so it's gonna have to be replaced but again let's see where we're at maybe it'll start maybe not yeah i'm getting absolutely nothing from that engine which is a bit interesting i do smell fuel i mean potentially it's just coming from the tank but usually when you smell fuel like that it means there's stuff going into the carb but yeah maybe that's not the case anyway i'm going to get the air box off i do want to give it a squirt of starting fluid and see if we can't get it to run for a second if it does run it'll verify that we have compression timing and spark then we know where to go from there yeah um that's a problem so this thing is flooding so bad that the fuel level is actually way up here so that's not good and this is going down right into the crankcase so most likely i need to change the oil again and yeah i'm not going to try to start it like this it's never going to start i'm sure the spark plug is wet at this point so let me get this back inside change the oil again probably pull the spark plug dry it out and get the carb in better shape i'm gonna get the fuel tank out of the way i'm just going to cut the fuel lines they need to be replaced anyway and once that's out of the way we'll change the oil get the carb off and probably pull a spark plug want to dry that out and make sure that it's sparking do okay just gonna leave the spark plug out for a bit let some of that evaporate pull the cord a few more times and maybe put a little bit of oil in there perfect so all right let's see how bad it is it actually doesn't look that bad yeah needle's stuck hmm wow look at all that chunk there's a ton of buildup on that needle so no wonder why it couldn't move now potentially the seat is still good and it was just the sides here that were hanging up but it's kind of hard to tell there's a lot of junk in there so yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna put this in the ultrasonic clean this out a bit you know poke through all the holes with the wire i want to get this guy off hopefully in one piece yeah not happening i'm not going to force it i'll soak it with this on and it'll probably just come off on its own and that's the main jet i pulled out from down there yeah it's getting there run it a few more times and we should be good okay this thing cleaned up pretty well you know i just rinsed everything out with water blew it dry and the seat cleaned up well too it actually looks fine so i think the issue was just all the debris that was on the side of the needle preventing the needle from moving but i think it'll do a good job now that it's clean so i'm going to reassemble this we'll test the needle function and the fall is good we'll throw it back on and bring it back out okay we'll try this thing out i'm just going to blow through the fuel line and when it's upside down that simulates the bowl being full air should not go through and i hear nothing yeah so that's working fine thankfully i was recording when the spring fell out i wasn't sure where it went but after double checking the footage it definitely was down there and the function is probably just to hold this emulsion tube in place i'm guessing it's a loose fit and probably removable so yeah i might have done this in the wrong order i'm going to pull the main jet back out we'll try this again okay let's try this thing out i usually tighten carburetors to about 60 inch pounds and air boxes do a little bit less especially when it's all plastic there's no metal bushings here if they're metal bushings i'd do 60 as well in this case 40 should be fine so i'm just going to put a little bit of oil down the cylinder i'm sure the fuel washed away whatever was left for oil on the top ends we're ready to give this thing another try for now i've emitted the fuel tank and actually the breather hose is unplugged the hose is pretty damaged and given that it was just feeding fuel right into the crankcase i thought it would be uh prudent to keep that off so let me pull the cord and see what happens yeah so a little bit faster jumps up yeah not too bad started first pull for a second there i thought it was over revving but it turns out it was just surging and i did have to turn the choke back on a click or two and about two minutes later i was able to turn this completely off so i think we're okay from a carb perspective now the engine speed was a bit fast it was running at 60.5 hertz unloaded and 131 volts and after applying a 1500 watt load the engine slowed down to 60.3 hertz which seemed a bit excessive so i did add another 1500 watts to double the load and the hertz held exactly at 60.3 so i think the engine is providing plenty of horsepower and the power head is doing what it should so i think we're in pretty good shape you know potentially i might slow it down a bit the adjustment for that's right here i would just turn that counterclockwise to bring the engine speed down but for now i think we're looking pretty good i just want to get this back inside kind of sort out the fuel lines get those replaced you know the breather hose is pretty badly damaged down here and taped up here so i'm sure this is going to need to be replaced hopefully this comes across but the fuel level is right there in the line and it's holding steady so that tells me needle and seat are doing what they should been troubleshooting the surging a bit you know under no load it runs fine with choke off and load it up to 3000 watts no problem but in between at 1 500 watts it seems to surge quite a bit and i did hold kind of the governor still just to see if the engine speed was changing and if it was that would indicate we have a carb problem but the engine ran fine and then i throttled it down manually ran fine tells me the idle circuit is good so this isn't the first time i've had this problem with the tecumseh pretty much all of them that i've picked up do this now i did manage to successfully fix this once by adjusting the governor arm but i have a different thing i want to try first i'm going to start it up just show you what i'm talking about and then we'll try something okay so hopefully you could see what was going on no load there's no hunting no surging load it up it surges like crazy and if i keep loading it up it actually works itself out but it's this kind of sweet spot it just has trouble with and i manually throttled it down no problems and then i kind of held the governor arm steady and the engine sounded good like if the engine was sputtering or you know losing speed it would tell me yeah there's a carb issue maybe a spark issue but that's not the case it's a governor issue and maybe a sensitivity issue but we're on the furthest hole out on the arm i can't make it any less sensitive than it is so this is what i'm going to try tecumseh doesn't have a spring on the arm or sorry on the rod that connects the governor arm to the carburetor most of them have a spring and the sole purpose of that is to take up any swap between the governor arm and the carburetor you know that rod fits in a hole on each end and if there's any slop you know things can kind of wiggle around a bit this spring holds everything tight so i'm going to temporarily install this see if it makes any difference so one end of the spring is right here and the other end is kind of up on throttle right where the linkage connects so can't really see it too well now but if this works i'll bring it back inside i'll take the air box off and hook it up better and show you better what i'm talking [Applause] about okay good that's all it was a spring now pretty much every small engine manufacturer does put those springs on tecums is the exception i'm not sure why you know maybe when it was new it didn't need it but this thing is not new anymore so there's slop on that governor rod and that's that's all it was causing this issue so luckily i had a few of those springs from other blown up engines that particular one came from a briggs 10 horse so when i get this back inside we'll get the air box off hook up that spring a little bit better and that way you can see also better what i'm talking about all right it's really hard to get this camera angle but this is the governor arm coming out and it connects to the governor rod which goes over to the carburetor and the slop i'm talking about hopefully you can see this but when i move the rod it moves around in that shaft and that is compounded by the fact that the rod connects to the carb and has a similar issue and that's all that was causing that oscillation so i hooked one into the spring right there which should be fine and the other end i temporarily put in this hole here and if i hold things still here you see how that rod is just moving around in there that's the problem so this spring ideally would be on a hole a little bit closer to the edge as it is right now it kind of drags and scrapes and over time that's probably going to wear out and just break the spring so i guess i have two options i can [Music] drill a hole right there or double up which some manufacturers do but i find whenever i try it it ends up binding a bit so that this doesn't kind of actuate the way that it should so probably just drill a hole and if that fails we'll try doubling it up i stopped drilling kind of second guessing myself putting it there the issue is when the throttle plate goes to close it's going to make contact and interfere with the operation of the throttle plate so this is not a good spot for that and on most carburetors they actually put that hole over here like in the case of this briggs and stratton it's on the outside but there's not enough meat here to do that and i did try to double up but the tolerance is too tight i can't get that spring in and even if i did it'll probably cause this to bind which is a bad idea so the governor arm is actually downhill and by placing it where it was it causes it to kind of press hard right there so i think the solution here is to actually put this on upside down yeah and that works a lot better the spring isn't touching this plate on the bottom anymore and it's not interfering at all with the operation of the throttle plate so i'm gonna leave good enough alone now i'm going to swap out the fuel line generally it's not a difficult task but on plastic tanks you have to be careful this outline is only held in by this rubber bushing and if you just start pulling on the fuel line there's a good chance you're just going to pull it out and or damage that bushing so what i like to do is actually cut the fuel line pretty short and then start nipping at it with some wire cutters and kind of get it from the side so you can just peel it off without exerting too much force [Music] you [Music] so going to replace the fuel line that goes kind of in between the engine and the flywheel now i am going to use quarter inch line but the outer diameter is actually going to be 7 16. rather than half an inch so that'll give me a little bit of extra room to work and make it a little easier to pull it through so so just gonna pull those wheels off again and there's actually four bolts holding the hub together there's two separate pieces so i'll also remove those bolts split the hub and throw a bit of black paint on them [Music] so now that the spring is secured in a permanent way i want to restart it just test it again under load make sure the governor response is good also the rpms were high and they were 62 and a half actually close to 63. i'm hoping adding that spring to the governor rod is going to influence those rpms hopefully in a positive way and based on what we see i'll just adjust the engine speed to bring it closer to 61.5 hertz it's actually a little slow now okay good the engine actually ran a bit slow with that spring on there and i quickly tested loading it up the governor did what it should the engine was not surging then i adjusted the engine speed up to 61.5 hertz did the same test and we were holding at about 60 hertz so everything was running pretty well and it's quite remarkable actually just adding that little spring there makes such a big difference now this is the third 11 horse tecumseh generator engine i've worked on and the first two suffered from pretty much the same issue and at the time i didn't know what it was you know one of the engines i did adjust the governor the governor arm there's like a pivot right there and that improved things a bit but nothing as dramatic as adding that spring so definitely something to keep in mind if you have one of these engines or you're working on one of these engines just adding that briggs 10 horse governor rod spring makes a big difference anyway this thing is pretty much done yeah i ordered the hose it's back ordered so it'll probably be here in a few weeks but other than that there's really nothing else to do on this so i hope this video helps someone thanks for watching okay got some bonus footage here the part did come in so this should be pretty easy i hope you

Channel: James Condon

Views: 35,644

Rating: 4.9481311 out of 5

Keywords: 37556, 695917, Carburetor Cleaning, Carburetor, Engine Flooded, Fixed, Flooding, Fuel in Oil, Governor Spring, Governor, Gsd in Oil, Hunting, Leaking Gas, OH318EA, PMA525500, Powermate Generator, Powermate, Small engine, Surging, Tecumseh 11HP OHV, Tecumseh, Troubleshooting

Id: nRWsOteeg7E

Length: 49min 4sec (2944 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 26 2020