Riding Mower Runs For A While Then Dies, Dies Out After 15 or 20 Minutes - Common Issue!

we have a Craftsman yts 4000 we're taking a look at here this morning customer brought it in and said that it shut off after they were mowing along about 20 minutes and wouldn't restart they had to let it sit for I think a half an hour 45 minutes before it would restart it fired up though and seemed to be doing okay but this has happened three or four times on them now this thing is looks like 115 of 09 it's got a little bit of life on it it's got the Briggs 24 horse V-Twin Platinum well that was real tight and connected just came apart when I opened it up look at this Hood out of the way [Music] now it seemed to run halfway decent when I fired it up to pull it in here obviously always check your oil before you start any engine most of the time we get these in and even if it's a brand new engine or one that we serviced a short time ago you know you'll open it up someone hasn't checked it in a year or two and it's almost completely out see it all the time but anyway we're gonna check this thing out first thing I like to do is run it independently on each cylinder so you've got two cylinders here this uh the 24 horse Platinum so it's got a cylinder here and a cylinder on the other side now we want to test those independently just to verify that we're getting the full 24 horsepower out of our engine now if only one of these cylinders is running a lot of times it's hard to tell you know if if you're mowing only an inch or two of grass that 12 horsepower is going to power this 42 inch deck perfectly fine you know this is only a 42 inch deck you've got you know older mowers the 12 or 13 horsepower you know power is a 42 inch deck fine well let's take a look and see if we've got both cylinders here first just to start off with and we'll go from there took a second to start not sure what that was about I haven't had it started yet this morning I brought this up yesterday but it looks a little bit close try this side so both sides run independently now if we have both of them hooked up again I thought it sounded pretty good when I brought it in didn't think that there was really anything bad sounding about it at all seems like it doesn't want to thing sounds pretty good here we're getting fire on both cylinders now if one cylinder will not start on either side the first thing you want to do is check your spark now we've got the spark Checker we can just turn it over and it'll tell us if that's you know a high medium or a Low Spark after we do that no I'm not sure apparently my battery must be dead right this second oh there it goes I don't have a spark Checker you can take the plug out and you can actually just kind of set it against the block turn it over and you should be able to visibly see at the tip of that spark plug that there is some sort of spark in between the middle and the outside you can verify that as long as it's touching you know something like this set it up there as long as it's touching you should be able to see that spark in between there and the ground we know we have spark on both cylinders because each runs independently we know each one has compression because it run it runs independently now if you have spark on one cylinder but it's still not running on that one cylinder you're going to want to check the valves now just a four 10 millimeter bolts here and I think they might be 3 8 bolts on this actually you want to pay attention to that make sure it is the right one because I they can strip out pretty easily if you do get the wrong size bolt on this anyway take that valve cover off there and check out your valve tray it should everything should be free your push rod should be on everything should be secure we're not going to check that out here just because we've you know already eliminated that as an issue so this thing runs halfway decent uh fuel filter looks relatively new looks like there is some debris in the bottom of it now it's not a ton but these fuel lines the way they look those things are probably original from 2009 and a lot of times what we see happen is this fuel line will actually deteriorate on the inside and start to collapse it'll just get kind of rubbery and start to collapse on itself in certain spots we see that a lot cause this and then you basically just run out of fuel it just sucks upon itself somewhere in that line we also see on these the pickup so this has a pickup that comes from the top of the tank and then a tube that goes down into the tank now it doesn't have a screen or anything at the bottom of that so it'll pull like a you know some pieces of grass or whatever and a bunch of them and as it tries to go around that corner they'll just kind of get stuck there it just keeps building and building and building and you know since 2009 it's probably put a couple pieces of grass or bugs or whatever at this corner piece and that just restricts the flow that you're getting up front eventually your engine can't keep up because the flow you know everything that's in this line has kind of float as fast as it could and there's a bottleneck somewhere I see that a lot of times on these we're gonna let this run uh I don't know for as long as it takes and figure out exactly what's going on that's just one of the most common problems I see there I also see after things heat up I see some ignition coils go bad now you can still test a spark after they heat up if you're shutting down and make sure that you're still getting spark to each side that is perfectly fine we also see there's a diode that sits on the kill wire in between these two coils on these Briggs and stratons we see those go bad a lot of times so if you're having an issue with you know spark on one side or the other a lot of times you can take that take that kill wire off and test them independently after it heats up also if you're having some issues with the coil eating up and cutting out we'll leave this run for a little bit and figure out exactly what's going on I've got no fuel at this point well there's still some there that's strange hmm I wonder if it was just enough sounded like it was running out of fuel to me that's why I decided to take it off here it's weird that they're still a little bit in the be very careful when doing this at home you don't want that to spray on a hot Muffler and start a fire that's that's very important now if you don't know the quality of the fuel that's in your mower obviously here we have a fuel flow issue you know the fuel is not flowing up to the carburetor that's why it's dying out if you don't know the quality of your fuel go ahead and hook it up just to a fuel hose like this and go ahead and just put it in a glass jar and kind of look at it you shouldn't see any separate levels in your gas at all if you're seeing separate levels that means that there's water at the bottom we see that as an issue a lot of times with this uh where things will run good for a while and then they'll pull up a water pocket and then they won't want to run good so every now and again you'll get them to start see it's weird because it does look if you look at the fuel filter here it looks like we still have fuel in the fuel filter so a lot of people would probably diagnose this as a bad fuel pump but I don't think that's the case we're going to take off this pickup and see exactly what's going on it's either that or the fuel line I suspect let's check the pickup you're going to want to just grab a hold of the fuel line and just kind of spin it to break it free and you should be able to grab a hold and just kind of pull it off looks like maybe a little piece a little piece of the inside of the fuel line came off at that point it does look like those fuel lines in pretty poor shape kind of deteriorating all around there's plenty of fuel in it pretty much up to the top oh I had fuel up to the up to the front now I did kind of clean this area off before we started just to make sure nothing gets in that tank that's best you know oh got a little bit of something that uh probably contributed a little bit to the fuel not getting to the front [Music] that's real nice I wonder how much grass is actually in this tank I mean it's from 2009 I bought I always wondered how that happened and how things got into people's tanks until one day I got finished Mowing and I looked down and my cap wasn't back on well I've got pine trees and everything else you know but I've yeah things happen things get in them somehow some way this Tank's probably gonna need completely flushed out I mean I think that's all of it down in there but that was a pretty big chunk pretty big chunk of stuff up in there and then this fuel line is also starting to deteriorate so we're going to empty the fuel tank clean it all out and then replace the fuel line going all the way to the front along with the fuel filter go ahead and replace this grommet while we're at it also that should solve our problem and get us back pump and fuel uh if all of this checks out and you're not getting any restriction obviously it could be a fuel pump issue it just I hardly ever see that on the pulse fuel pumps it's very very rare you know I get maybe one a year that's bad other than that I hardly ever see them correct me if I'm wrong if you guys see something else let me know down below thanks for watching like And subscribe

Channel: Individualized Repair Inc

Views: 13,526

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Id: zacRNzAjbnU

Length: 13min 48sec (828 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 12 2023