"Won't Start"

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The fuel pipe is a small, tapering plastic tube that goes directly down from the carb to the fuel tank. It has a little ball in it--a check valve--that allows fuel to flow only one way (Fig. 11). Pull the fuel pipe off. (To get to it, you may have to remove the carburetor and gas tank jointly from the engine, then take the carb off the tank.) Can you jiggle the ball in the tube? If not, blow the clogged pipe out from the bottom to clean it. (If your engine commonly dies when the tank's half empty, you probably need to clean this check valve.)

The fuel needle sits above the check valve. It adjusts how much fuel can get into the carburetor. Unscrew it and see if the tiny hole inside is clogged (Fig. 11). If so, clean it with a carburetor cleaner or some other solvent, or blow it out with compressed air. Screw the needle back in, gently, as far as it will go, and then back it out one and a quarter turns.

There may be other adjustment screws on your carburetor. They're for such things as setting high and low idle speeds. Unless you know what you're doing, leave 'em darn well alone. But as long as you're fiddling with the carburetor, why not squirt all its orifices with some store-bought carburetor cleaner? That alone sometimes brings engines back to life.

Put everything back together, give her a few cranks, and see if she runs. Our guess is she will. If not, sorry. Load her up; it's shop time.

Now, let's look at the dry-plug trouble with the Tecumseh carburetor. You can't do as much to this one. It doesn't suck air up from the tank the way the Briggs carb does. Instead, the tank sits higher than the carburetor and the fuel flows by gravity down into the carburetor. A float valve (similar to the shutoff in your toilet tank) controls this flow.

If you're having fuel troubles, open up the carburetor from beneath. Since the doughnut-shaped float valve normally sits in fuel, some gas may spill out. jiggle the valve slightly up and down (Fig. 12); not too far or the float needle may fall out. It should let gas in when it's down and shut it off when it's up. jiggling often fixes a no-flow problem. If it does, close the carburetor back up and-hip, hip, hooray-fire away.

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