I’ve been trying to get my pressure washer to start since it died on me at K&T’s after I refilled the gas tank. I went through the whole process of checking out the fuel system and the electrical at least 3 times.
Finally I decided to take a step I haven’t tried on any of my engines and I pulled off the valve cover and looked at the valve operation. That revealed the problem. I pulled the starting cord and watched the valves. The exhaust valve was opening fine, the intake valve wasn’t. I didn’t have the specs for valve clearance yet so I tightened the set screw to just open the valve and went on to see if now the machine would start. It did but ran rough. I went on line and found the valve clearance specs and will set the valves to spec and see if my pressure washer will now run correctly.
Now I’ve also advanced my knowledge about how to keep my small gas motors running.
That success spurred me on to do another repair. The DVR in our bedroom once again had failed. The last time it failed (April 2009) 2 capacitors had lost their electrolytic. This time it was the same issue with 3 capacitors. From my reliability engineering days I know this is a typical failure mode fore these parts when they age. It is the reason we forbid the use of this technology capacitor in the missiles we built. The last thing you want is having dead capacitors when you take something from storage and need it to work.
I had ordered the replacement capacitors and they had just arrived so, while my fix-it mojo was hot I made the repair on the DVR.
I’m pleased to report the DVR is now working properly.
3-years ago I put the blue parts in this picture in.
This time these 3 parts were bad. You can see the brown residue on the tops of the parts. Only 1 of the 3 tested out dead electrically but the other 2 would be failing soon. You can see that 3 years ago (above) these 3 parts were clean and shiny.
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