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Don't know weather I am happy or T'd off, or both, but the 8 hp Tec on my Craftsman Chipper shredder vac cart blew the entire back of the block out today after about 3 hours of use. It gave me fits when I first bought this unit, and used to run wild, and had erratic idle. Turned out to be a broken plastic governor gear. Replaced it, and set max rpm and worked pretty darn good the rest of last year. Today I decided to do a bit of final clean up around here, and three hours later it was toast. It gave me fits on starting it, and idleing initially, abaauata after I got it running it worked fine. This is the motor that smoked and burned oil that I had posted about in the vac cart threads a while back. Motor was running at full throttle, and I head a ticking type noise, which sounded like it was coming from inside the fan assembly, and I thought I may have picked up a piece of fence wire, but before I could shut it off and check, it just made a big bang, and died, with a nice flow of oil all over.
I think the rod may have been bent or stressed and cracked from the initial governor problems, but can't swear to that, but anyway its history and soon to be melted down and cast into something more reliable in my home foundry.
Now I need to find a good deal on a B & S engine to replace it with. I have a good B & S on my homebrew cart, but it does not have the 4 bolt pattern needed to adapt the blower to the motor. So I finished up the work today with the homebrew, which actually did a better job as it is not fussy about wet leaves and pinestraw like the agri fab (Craftsman) unit was. Thats two years out of the homebrew cart and it has yet to miss a beat other than when it initially shed the blades on the original fan. Motor is probably close to 18 or more years old and runs like the day it was made. I do know one thing for sure. No matter what the price, I will never have another Tecumseh powered piece of equipment in my possession.
I think the rod may have been bent or stressed and cracked from the initial governor problems, but can't swear to that, but anyway its history and soon to be melted down and cast into something more reliable in my home foundry.
Now I need to find a good deal on a B & S engine to replace it with. I have a good B & S on my homebrew cart, but it does not have the 4 bolt pattern needed to adapt the blower to the motor. So I finished up the work today with the homebrew, which actually did a better job as it is not fussy about wet leaves and pinestraw like the agri fab (Craftsman) unit was. Thats two years out of the homebrew cart and it has yet to miss a beat other than when it initially shed the blades on the original fan. Motor is probably close to 18 or more years old and runs like the day it was made. I do know one thing for sure. No matter what the price, I will never have another Tecumseh powered piece of equipment in my possession.