Stuck Kubota Engine - Will It Run?

hey guys welcome back so today I brought home this Kubota generator and as you can tell by looking at it it's got some issues unfortunately I don't know the history on this machine because someone threw it away it was at the dump on First Sight though this control panel caught my eye someone had disconnected it from the frame and it's only being held in place by these wires also the fuel tank bolts have been removed and I think the worst of it is probably on this side you know all these wires have been disconnected and that's definitely an issue but I don't think it's the issue that led to this machine being thrown away because when I tried to pull over this Kubota Engine and I found that the engine was stuck so I don't know what led to this you know if it was run out of oil then it's probably terminal but I don't know that you know it could be something simple so I'm going to start peeling some layers away and get to the bottom of what's going on with this engine you know worst case we'll know why it failed potentially I could get it running again so let me get you set up a little bit better and get going on this plenty of oil and it does not look to be watered down or diluted so I give this one hope that is rust on the spark plug so somehow water or moisture got into the engine and I'm guessing at this point since it's not turning either the Rings are stuck or the valves are stuck not sure but yeah I would say water might have done this so I'm actually gonna spray a bunch of PB Blaster in there maybe some WD-40 and I'm going to pull the recoil off just see if I can rock the engine and potentially get it to free up foreign [Music] foreign just an observation here but the bolts that hold the engine to the mounts are missing on both sides and it's the same on the other end where the state amounts are so not sure why someone would remove those but they are removed and you can see the engine has already shifted out of place so we'll add that to the list assuming I can get this freed up foreign foreign at least the engine's not seized but it couldn't be much closer it requires a lot of force to rotate that flywheel and at this point I think I have made at least one full Revolution and it has not gotten any easier to turn that engine and at no point during that Revolution was there an easy spot where the flywheel would spin freely so that actually gives me a lot of information I don't think it's a top-end issue based on that because if it was something like a stuck valve I could have backed that engine up and had it rotating freely and that was not the case also the piston and the cylinder if there was an issue there I would expect when the Pistons at the top or the bottom of the travel that I'd be able to kind of rock the flywheel and have it move more easily and I didn't sense that either so I don't think it's a top end issue most likely it's a bottom end issue I'm guessing the connecting rod but let's give that PB Blaster some time to work its magic you know let it soak for maybe 48 Hours on the off chance that something does free up but I think this is going to be a tear down video it's actually been over two weeks since I last worked on this machine now I'm not expecting anything to be different but I will give it a try I'm going to put a wrench on the crankshaft again and see if there's any change foreign foreign [Music] foreign the engine has freed up quite a bit more it's pretty easy to turn it over now with a wrench and I can even turn it over with the drill I don't think it's free enough yet that I can actually use the recoil to turn the engine over but it's getting pretty close so I'm going to get the compression tester hooked up I want to try spinning it with the drill and see if we have any compression foreign wow we're at 60 PSI that's pretty good I think it's going to need another week or so soaking with the PB Blaster before it's ready to attempt to start and assuming it does fully free up the wiring does need to be sorted out so at a minimum right now I'm going to reconnect that control panel and I want to find which wire will trip this solenoid here to trigger the starter because I do want to get a battery hooked up and see if the starter has enough power to turn the engine over as it is right now foreign the way the starter circuit usually works is that on the battery positive you have two wires coming out the heavier gauge wire goes straight to the starter and the smaller gauge wire usually performs two functions first it sends power into the control panel and when you turn the key to start it passes that power through a wire to actuate the starter solenoid which energizes the starter and then once the engine is running that usually doubles to charge the battery anyway this is disconnected but I do see in the back of the control panel there is a red wire and most likely that goes to that so I have the multimeter set up to test continuity I'm going to connect one lead to this wire and the wire harness coming out of the control panel doesn't have too many wires you know the hot 12 volts coming out of here is most likely going to be protected so it's going to be red or yellow the black is protected at least on one of them but that color is usually used for the coil so if I had to guess I would say it's the red wire so put the other lead right here and I'm just going to turn the key to start and that's it so this red wire goes most likely down here which looks to be the starter solenoid and then this wire here connects to there and if I connect a battery I should be able to crank the engine so let's give that a try okay good that starter it has enough power to crank the engine so I'm gonna add some more PB Blaster into the cylinder I'll give it another week or so and then move forward with this all right it's been another week and after shutting the camera off I did end up swapping out the PB Blaster with some seafoam so I'm going to crank the engine over just make sure it's out of the cylinder and then I want to put a torque wrench on that crankshaft I actually did that last week when the engine freed up and it took 120 inch pounds to rotate the engine so I want to see if there's any Improvement foreign left must have snuck by the Rings all right let's try 100 inch pounds nope 120. yeah 120. so nothing's really changed in the last week with the Sea Foam and 120 inch pounds that is that's a lot of force really required to turn this and it shouldn't be that high so my concern is if I start it right now the engine might not last very long so I'm gonna put some more PB Blaster in we'll give it some more time but before I do that I think I'm going to spend a little bit of time taking a look at the spark all the wires are disconnected this is a CDI system it needs to have the wires connected the right wires so let's take a look at that and see if we can't get sparked to this engine haven't actually checked for spark yet but with all the disconnected wires not expecting we're going to have any but let's see and we got nothing so I would suspect that these wires here are the ones we need to connect in order to get this to fire correctly now I did cheat I took a look online I wanted to find a service manual or a wiring diagram and came up empty couldn't even find a user manual but luckily these seem to be color-coded we've got an orange coming out of the coil in an orange right here got a brown and a brown looks like a white with a red stripe which matches this one and we've got two black wires coming out so one of these is probably to kill spark and the other one most likely is a ground for the coil in order to get spark so we've got a black wire here and one here well let's try it with these three wires connected let's see what we get [Applause] and nothing so I'm going to connect one of those black wires we'll try it again [Applause] nice we got Spark so this is the black wire I connected which brought spark back anyway as far as killing spark I have the ignition set to the off position and this is the harness coming down from the control panel and there's two black wires and a yellow wire now not sure which black is for what this one does have a a white line on it and then we have just another black wire here and one actually with a white line so if I had to guess I would say that goes there but let's double check I've got the multimeter set to test continuity one lead is connected to the frame so when it makes a connection to ground we get a beep so let's see if any of these are grounded out and that's the only wire that's making a connection to ground which that that needs to be sent up to the control panel so I am guessing it's one of these and if I had to make a bet I would say it is this one so now let's see if we have a signal coming down and we do let's try turning the switch on and see if it stops beeping yep and it does the the switch actually doesn't make a great connection you kind of got to wiggle the key so okay so that that'll kill Spark and I assume it should go here this is a black wire with a white line which actually matches that and that goes to the coil and actually we can test that real quick if I connect this red to here that's a connection right to ground so if I crank the engine now we should not get Spark foreign okay good and that grounded the coil out so I think we're on to something here so black with the white stripe goes there then we're just left with the yellow and a black and it would seem like it would be the oil sensor so this black wire here is a ground going into the switch and the yellow wire would be when we have low oil and the yellow wire actually goes up in the control panel and there is a low oil light which I assume that will light up so that is pretty much set I think my only question here is what are these don't know so we'll leave them there for now let's make sure we still have spark foreign this is what I was thinking about here the 12 volts output so potentially that wire harness supplies power for that but I forgot this does have idle control and this is all vacuum controlled meaning this vacuum Servo down here is what's connected to the governor so when this activates vacuum gets sent on this line and actuates this Servo but there has to be something electronic controlling that so I followed the vacuum hoses and actually this choke is vacuum controlled as well they all come up here and go into what appears to be an electronic valve there's actually two tabs right here and this harness reaches up there just fine so if I had to guess those need to be connected to this valve and then the wiring should be complete I'd say we're getting pretty close we got an engine that spins we got compression we got spark I assume we have timing you know fuel is always an issue so I'm going to get that carburetor off get it up on the bench we'll open it up and see what it looks like yeah filter doesn't look too good and this metal piece I'm pretty sure is supposed to go on the other side surprisingly it's not falling apart so it's not in the best shape but it's it is usable foreign yeah there's a lot going on up on top here so I need to get this stuff off most of it is related to the choke the automatic choke so there's a couple screws here and it looks like a bolt right there and hopefully that'll just lift right off foreign foreign that I get it off it is removable but I don't think it's worth it the ultrasonic should not harm this I just really wanted to get that Servo out of there yeah that is clogged solid that's the main jet so this definitely would not have run yeah that's not coming off so I'm gonna soak it a bit first before trying that again I believe the emulsion tube though should be removable on this one all right that's not going to come out the emulsion tube it's not stuck but I think the main jet is blocking it it's also blocking the float in the needle from coming out so gonna have to leave that in there which I don't like doing because the solution I use in the ultrasonic is not good for the needle but don't have much of a choice let's try the pilot jet okay this one I'm just going to see where it's set at right now before taking it out that's one turn one and a half turns foreign this came out really well almost looks like new you know I also got the main jet out and I really had no choice I tested the function of the needle and seat and it wasn't holding so the needle had to come out and I did have to use excessive force and thankfully this came out because if it hadn't I'd be in trouble there is no clone option for this carburetor thankfully Kubota does sell the OEM part unfortunately it costs 587 dollars and 37 cents and that does not include tax and shipping so that would have sunk this ship pretty quick and exceeds the value of that generator by at least double anyway I've had this soaking in a bit of WD-40 trying to bring this needle back it does have a ridge around it and it had a little bit of scale so I'm going to get this out we'll give it a try and see if it's going to work I'm not sure it's actually pretty good but I think I hear just a bit coming out of there so I'm gonna hook up the Mighty Vac and uh get a gauge on it see how it's doing yeah it's not holding it's a little inconsistent sometimes it does hold but not this time yeah this needle it's not holding so we need a new one I do have another one that I think is compatible with this so we'll give that a try I think this needle is a clone part it is meant for a Mikuni carb which I believe this is and they look about the same so hopefully this one will work it is dropping a little but as carbs only designed for about half a PSI so I will expect it to bleed off a bit but it should stabilize around two or three PSI yeah and we're good it's staying at three so that should work okay well it's four weeks later and every day I've been spraying PB Blaster in there rocking the engine just a little hoping that it would free up a little bit more unfortunately it hasn't I just double checked the torque it still requires 120 inch pounds to rotate that flywheel so I think it's as good as it's gonna get you know is it enough I don't know I mean these large Flathead engines they do require a lot more Force to turn over than a more modern overhead valve version of a similar horsepower engine so maybe it's okay maybe it's not you know the good news is Kubota does sell parts so I could tear this thing down find out for sure and if it needs some parts I could place an order but it doesn't make sense you know this is an old Generator and despite the name on it Kubota these don't fetch a lot of money I did some research online and used like this they sell for anywhere between sixty dollars and 250 dollars and as I saw with the carburetor price the parts for this generator are extremely expensive and actually this machine is worth more in Parts than it is as a complete unit now that doesn't mean I want to part this out but I guess what I'm trying to say is that the way that it is right now it will start and run and that will let me evaluate what works on it and what doesn't because if the engine fails which it might I at least know what I can part out and have confidence in selling to someone as a good part but I'm hoping it doesn't come to that so I'm going to change the oil I think there's a lot of PB Blaster in there at this point put some fresh stuff in get the carb back on and get this outside get it started and see what happens foreign foreign oil actually looks halfway decent I mean it's well used oil but there's no water in there and more importantly there's no bits of metal No Gray tint to that oil so there's really no sign of an engine problem I think the initial thought when I saw that spark plug bib in the right one moisture got in there I saw a rust on the plug and that's probably what led to the engine being the way that it was anyway the plug's been cleaned we'll get that reinstalled and move on that's pretty much it for now I'm gonna leave the air box off I did reconnect the vacuum line for the choke and I also found four bolts so I re-secured the engine and the stator so I think we're ready to go don't think my neighbors are going to like this one too much I think it's going to be loud and most likely pretty Smoky I think a lot of PB Blaster made its way into the exhaust so if it starts it's most likely going to smoke now I've got a lot of things on standby here because I don't know how long this is going to run if it runs at all so I've got two space heaters hooked up ready to go I've got a multimeter on the battery I want to see if the charging system works so we're starting at 12.54 volts and I get this meter hooked up to the DC output on the panel so let's get this started and see what it does [Applause] well it started and the engine sounded good but it was running too fast so potentially the governor is blown out on this I'm not sure so I'm gonna restart it again I actually didn't have the light turned on so I want to see that that light comes on now that I have the switch turned on and also once it starts I might be able to control this throttle manually at least keep it under control and keep it running a little bit longer foreign foreign foreign [Applause] foreign [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] foreign [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Applause] are things considered this is doing pretty well the engine it sounds good the carburetor is running the engine very well and we have power both on the AC side and the DC side but that Governor it's not responding at all you know at no point did I feel that Governor trying to push the throttle plate closed so either it's broken internally or maybe out of adjustments so I'm going to loosen that nut try making an adjustment see if that has any effect to adjust the governor you want to get your bearings first this spring is pulling the arm in full open throttle so in this position it's idle that position is Full Throttle and what you want to do is just take note of that position counterclockwise is Full Throttle so I should loosen this nut and then rotate this counterclockwise to recalibrate the governor and it's already loose that is good news so the governor isn't actually broken all right let's give that a try thank you foreign foreign [Applause] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I am almost speechless on this one I was not expecting this to run like it is you know when I got this the engine was stuck all the wiring for the most part disconnected and missing Hardware including engine bolts and stator mounting bolts and apparently someone loosened up the governor arm but this thing is a hundred percent I mean it supported a 3000 watt load no issues it was charging the battery and it had DC output on the front panel not to mention the idle control works the engine it sounds great the smoking stopped and more importantly the engine it has freed up I mean this is exactly how it should feel so I think this is a survivor so I'm going to get this back inside finish putting it together and I want to get it back out for an extended test foreign as far as the battery goes this one I'm sure is overkill for this generator but it is the only one I have with the correct Terminals and this one actually was free to me someone had dumped it in a parking lot so I brought it home and it took and held the charge just fine that was months ago so I'm going to leave this here but I don't have the original Hardware to mount this properly in the generator but I do have a couple of J Hooks these were from the NEC generator that didn't make it and they're just long enough so I cut up a piece of angle aluminum and put some holes in it and that'll be used to strap it down but I don't want to put it so close to these terminals so I'm just going to rotate the battery 180 degrees and tighten it down all right this generator isn't actually attached to that furniture dolly so I do want to correct that but before doing that you know this dolly it's in pretty bad shape the wheels actually barely turn so I'm going to swap that out for a slightly newer model foreign [Applause] foreign I've been trying to figure out who makes this engine you would think it's Kubota they're well known for their engines but the engines they make are diesel engines and I was walking by or walking through a friend's shop the other day and he had a home light generator in the corner of his shop and it it was a smaller unit I think it was 1400 Watts but it looked identical to this one so you know I don't think Kubota would have rebranded it and allowed home light to sell it you know most likely both Kubota and Homelite bought this from someone else and my initial thought was that it was a Yamaha you know I worked on an ef-6000 a couple years ago that is very similar in quality to this one and also the starter recoil it looks like a Yamaha recoil this is a Yamaha one right here but other engines have recoils like this like the robin engine as well as Kawasaki so I wasn't completely sure I think another clue is the carburetor the carb that was on there the 600 carb the body matches this one exactly and in fact this one slides right onto these posts without issue this came from a Yamaha mz360 and they have clones of this for like 30 or 40 bucks would be a good option maybe for this engine except for the fact the throttle plate on this one closes opposite the way it needs to be on this engine unfortunately and I think the thing that kind of sealed the deal was the starter over here when I was editing the video I noticed a little logo right there in the starter that is the Yamaha logo so I just did a Google search old Yamaha generators and one of the first ones that came up was a Yamaha ef-5000 dve and that one looks identical to this one so this is in fact a rebranded Yamaha ef-5000 dve up until now everything you've watched was filmed back in March it was quite cold and at the time I decided to wait a couple months for things to warm up before bringing this outside for the final extended test well two months has now turned into six it's now pretty much the end of the summer and I was just finally getting around to bringing this outside so I was just doing the final prep work I tested the battery the battery's dead and it won't take a charge so that's not too surprising since I found that in a parking lot so we do need a new one of those and then there's the tank I mean the tank from the outside it is Rusted and I thought I looked in the tank and determined it was in good condition but I don't think I did that I think I got sidetracked on the fact that the engine was stuck and the wiring was all disconnected because I just took that cap off about to put fuel on the tank and what I saw was a little bit concerning because the tank is actually in very bad shape you can see there's a lot of junk down there and rust so yeah this tank it's an issue and an even bigger issue is the fact that if I wanted to buy a new one of these tanks or about four hundred dollars and buying a Honda clone tank is not an option because dimensionally this is smaller and the bottom of the tank it's actually cut in such a way that it fits onto this generator properly a Honda tank would not do that and I couldn't buy one even if I wanted to because that is a discontinued tank so hopefully it cleans up otherwise I'm going to have to look at some other options because this generator even up and running it's not going to sell for much more than 150 dollars so I don't really have a lot of options here as far as you know buying an external tank and a fuel pump or converting this to propane I mean both of those things are possible but it'll cost more than this generator is worth so I'm going to try to clean this up the best I can at least get it usable and hopefully that works out so I'm going to use some Degreaser and some nuts and bolts we'll put it in there shake it around try to get all the junk off the bottom of the tank and then I might fill it with water just see if there's any pinhole leaks and if that all looks good I'm going to use some evaporrust to clean up that rust now the good news about evaporost is that it will not harm metal it only eats rust but if that tank doesn't have good metal on it then it will end up eating a hole in that tank but not sure I have much of a choice here so let's get the tank outside we'll put some Degreaser in it and start cleaning it out [Applause] foreign foreign foreign foreign you get the idea it's cleaning up pretty well most of the sludge is off the bottom of the tank so I'm going to keep doing this because the water is still coming out dirty after I shake it around but you can kind of get an idea of what was in there that is five gallons of very dirty water so do this a few more times until the water comes out clear and then move on to that evapor rust ah that's pretty much it just gotta hurry up and wait so I'm gonna leave it out here in the Sun for the day it might take a couple days to clean up but right now it's only in the lower compartment at some point I do need to tip it to get up over there and maybe the sides as well but yeah we'll just give it some time and it should clean up pretty well foreign [Music] so I think that's about it I haven't seen much additional progress overnight and we're now at the 24 hour mark so I'm going to get the evapor rust out mop up the bottom of the tank a bit and run a little bit of fresh fuel in there to get the remaining evapor rust out and then I'm going to put some ethanol free fuel in the tank right away to keep it from flash rusting foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] okay [Music] despite what I just said I think I'm gonna put some water through the system and a few nuts and bolts and shake it around because the black stuff coming out that is from the evaporized that is the converted rust and I want to again get get it clean flowing before trying to use this on the generator [Music] foreign [Applause] [Music] foreign luckily this has a really big filter that's in good condition so if there are any Little Bits left they're not going to make it through that filter [Music] I nearly filled the tank with ethanol-free fuel so I'm going to let this sit for a few days let the evapor rust and remaining water kind of work its way down to the bottom and I'll just drain it filter it take any water out of the fuel and then put the good stuff back in so while I'm waiting for that to kind of percolate I did pick up a new battery my intention was to get a similar battery as what I had in there but those batteries our surprising amount of money they were about two hundred dollars at the few auto stores I checked out so instead of the post style battery I ended up getting a tractor battery that was about 50 bucks and I think it should crank the engine without issues so let's get that mounted up and give that a try [Music] yeah it's not looking too good foreign foreign thank you the bracket I made earlier for that other battery does not really fit I could cut it down some but the J Hooks the threads actually end way up here so that's not going to work and I've since acquired a few of these large velcro straps which I think should work just fine in this case perfect got the fuel line reconnected and the tank reinstalled so let's get it started let it run for a bit let the engine warm up and I'll put a 3000 watt load on it we'll just let it run like that for about an hour and make sure everything's good foreign [Applause] [Music] [Music] thank you it's been running for half an hour without any issues but I almost forgot this generator it is a brushless generator and when looking at the parts diagram the design looked very different than what I normally see it looked more textbook so I'm going to get out the oscilloscope we'll hook it up and just take a quick look at the waveform see if it's any cleaner than the brushless generators I usually see foreign [Applause] it's dirty but not nearly as bad as I see let's load it up see if it changes at all yeah not not much better I would say actually worse that looks pretty bad but it is brushless that's what you get [Applause] [Music] [Music] well guys that's pretty much it I mean this one I didn't give much of a chance the engine was quite stuck and Against All Odds it became unstuck we had compression we got spark after reconnecting all those wires and this thing started right up and raced out of control so thankfully it was just a loose Governor arm on that Governor's shaft and then we got control of the engine speed just to find out the tank is in pretty bad shape and of course parts for this are ridiculously expensive so all those things for all those reasons I didn't think this one had much of a chance I was convinced it was going to be a tear down video but this one it is definitely a survivor so I hope this video helped someone thanks for watching foreign

Channel: James Condon

Views: 206,440

Keywords: A5000, A5000-3-120-Y, Broken Governor, Brushless, CDI, Carb Clean, Carburetor, Compression Test, Engine Speed, Evaporust, Fixed, Generator, Governor Reset, Hertz, High RPM, How To, How-To, Kubota A5000, Kubota Generator, Kubota, Load Test, Moisture in Engine, No Spark, Oscilloscope, PB Blaster, Rusted Gas Tank, Rusted Petrol Tank, Rusted Spark Plug, Seized Engine, Sine Wave, Small Engine, Stuck Engine, Troubleshooting, Volts, Yamaha EF5000, Yamaha

Id: O2o9FuPB2Fk

Length: 74min 55sec (4495 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 10 2022