Jimby needs to use his legs a bit more to prolong their life so until I relent about fixing the ride-on I'll be mowing the grass the hard way, well almost as this new mower is at least self-propelled. This was only a test first run, I'd expect wearing fancier footwear would be better in future.
Upon arrival I gave it a good inspection while assembling it, I suspected correctly the valve clearances would be awry, I think they were done by a Gorilla on a rattle gun so I backed them off a tad. I think tight valve clearances are a curse that's all too common now and would have given many an otherwise good engine a bad name. This is set by a double nut but to unlock them the first time at least required me to loosen the big 14 mm nut as the small 10 mm one was too tight to loosen. I just adjusted the valve clearances simply by finger tightening till it touched and then backing off a quarter of a turn.
My old workmate Ken Eagle will be impressed with this brand, it being the cheapest Chinese made mower I could find shouldn't worry him. While I had the valve cover off I painted it to give it a bit of customisation.
It's a lovely quiet mower but I'll need to find a fresh battery for my dB meter to measure it.
Even the wheels impress me by having proper sealed ball bearings, plus being chinese it's very doubtful they'd have bothered to make the some expensive propriety size.
Your best bet for finding a replacement deck for the riding mower is to find a shop that sells used parts. Lots of people don't keep an eye on engine oil resulting in lots of junk mowers with good parts but bad engines.
ReplyDeleteSo many companies steal our name these days.
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