Bob--What can I do to help? I've been where you are before, and it is terribly frustrating. Some things you can check---Take the sparkplug out and push a long piece of wire down the sparkplug hole. Set the sparkplug out on the engine block and turn the engine by hand with the ignition on. The spark should happen when the piston is about 1/8" before top dead center. (That's what the wire is for, to let you know where the piston is.). If you have run the engine in with an electric motor to loosen it up, then with the sparkplug in place give it a spin by hand. It should bounce back when it comes up on the compression stroke. If it doesn't bounce back, then either your valves aren't sealing or your rings aren't sealing. Take the sparkplug out, squirt some thirty weight oil into the sparkplug hole, then put the sparkplug back in. Spin it again by hand. If it bounces back now, then you know your rings aren't sealing. If it still doesn't bounce back, then your valves aren't sealing. Unhook the gas line from the carburetor and blow on it. You should hear it bubbling in the gas tank. (Make sure that the tank has fuel in it.) Use the factory pre-sets on the carburetor if you are running an after-market carb. About 80% of small engines that won't run can be traced directly to the valves not sealing. As I said before, sacrifice a spark-plug by breaking the porcelain out of it and solder a tube of approximately 0.175" outside diameter into the sparkplug. Screw the modified spark-plug back into place and put an airline on it--give it about 20 to 30 psi (block the crankshaft so it can't turn unexpectedly). When the piston is at top dead center on the compression stroke, there shouldn't be any air coming out the carburetor nor out of the exhaust. Make sure when you are trying to start it that the engine is turning at least about 300 rpm.---Brian
My absence for the last week was due to another project imposing itself. I had been saying for quite a while that when I laid out my shop I made some mistakes and wanted to fix them. You know that made up stuff about walking 10,000 steps in a day? I'd do that in a day in the shop going back and forth between the mill or whatever I was working on to get a drill bit or some tool. I told myself I needed to add some bigger shelves and move things to be more centrally located.
Over the holidays and early January, my wife and I talked and planned and then I spent the last week, cleaning and rearranging. Do you remember these puzzles they had 50 years ago where you're supposed to put the numbers in order? You'd have to move a lot of things to get to the one you really wanted to move.
That's like rearranging the shop. I guess a more modern version would be Tetris with real things.
The good news is I think I'm done or close enough to done rearranging. I was very encouraged by the ignition pops I was getting a week ago. It happened over a narrow range of the lever on the carburetor. I was going to experiment with the idle speed adjustment and see if anything made the pops more consistent over a wider range of movement of that lever.
Brian, I was thinking about the strength of the intake valve spring and calculated that normal air pressure of 14.7 PSI would cause about 10 ounces of force if there was a vacuum on the cylinder side of the intake valve. I measured how much force it takes on the valve to open it and that was about 5 ounces. That tells me if the piston pulls even half the air pressure the spring would open. I don't know if that's good or bad. Would it be better if it took half that force to open that valve? More? Less?
I don't have access to the compressor right now due to rearranging the shop. Not sure how long it will take to be able to run your tests.
Bob if you are close to Sarasota bring Webster be glad to help get her running Bill Burnett
Thanks, Bill, but I'm in Melbourne, over near the Kennedy Space Center. I think that puts us about 200 miles apart.
