Dentist appointment this morning. I had my teeth cleaned. The most painful part was paying for it out of my own pocket because I don’t currently have dental insurance. When I semi-retired last fall I looked into it but it appeared that after you got the insurance, you had to wait anywhere from six months to a year for most of the benefits to kick in. Didn’t seem like a good deal to me.
I spent the afternoon installing a new carburetor on a brush cutter/weed wacker. I’ve had the thing for a number of years now and did little maintenance on it outside of changing the sparkplug. Last year it seemed sluggish, this year it seemed really sluggish. Sometimes it would run decently while other times it would barely run and didn’t even seem to want to turn the blade. I took a small engine repair course in the fall and after bringing it in and demoing it, the instructor said it was most likely the carburetor failing. Since it was a two-cycle engine he recommended replacing it instead of rebuilding it since the cost would be about the same and rebuilding would require a lot more work. I purchased a cheap Chinese knockoff carburetor on Amazon (which the instructor said would be just fine) and finally got around to installing it today. It took a while to do but was fairly straight forward. After completing the installation I revved it up and sorry to say it’s not any better. It might actually be a little worse. At least it started though which shows I probably did the installation correctly. I’ll take another look at it this weekend and see if I can figure out what’s going on with it. It may just be time for a new brush cutter.
Here’s a helpful hint. The most important thing I learned in the small engine repair course was not to use regular gas in small engines. The ethanol that the government requires in the gas leaves deposits and will destroy an engine over time. If you’re using a small device such as a weed wacker your best bet is probably the 100% gas available at places like Home Depot. If you’re using a lawn tractor or something bigger go with premium and put an engine stabilizer in it to keep it from spoiling.
