Mowing the lawn today, my mower engine started to blow oil out the side not sure exactly where from. It spewed onto the hot muffler and made a lot of white smoke. I shut it down and tried to figure out what was up. There was oil in the air filter and I added a bit more oil to make up for what was lost and started it up again and it seemed to be fine again. What was up with that?
Mark
Did you tip the mower over to remove/sharpen the blade recently? Always try to tip the mower so the carb is up. You might also want to clean/replace the air filter if it was saturated with oil.
Les
As already mentioned, tipping the mower the wrong direction to access the deck area is a common problem.
Another possible cause is overfilling the mower crankcase with oil.
I got a free mower when somebody did this. A neighbor abandoned a mower which smoked horribly through the muffler and even spit out oil as you attempted to start it. One half hour spent cleaning the air filter, cleaning the spark plug and draining the excess oil gave me a perfectly fine mower for free.
She (the previous owner) had added as much oil as the engine and fill tube would hold. If a little oil is good, then a lot must be better?
Good luck, Gideon
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Mark
"when the car is low, I add a quart"
I think that's the mentality.
Well, when your baby is hungry do you buy him a Quarter Pounder and a large fry and cram them into his mouth until he's finished them all?
Dude
If you cant tell us where the pil is coming out of, how are we supposed to know. You're the one with the mower. Maybe if you could tell us the location of the leak, we could help. Otherwise ten thousand possibilities exist.
I have an old mower that every spring starts to smoke because of a sticky piston ring, and I know that for fact because I did some tests on it. I could rebuild it, but it seems to be fine after a few hours of use. But that's my mower. You need to be much more specific.
Tom Jones
yeah, I'll get a chance to tear it apart this weekend.
no I didn't tip it recently, it's been running fine till this...
the sticky piston ring causes it to burn oil and smoke or causes it to regergetate oil?
mine was squirting oil out the side from under the shroud which I will remove the weekend to investigate further. the oil was leaking onto the muffler causing smoke, the oil was not being burned in the cylinder
thanks Mark
Smoke from the muffler
If yoor squirting oil, you got a problem. I would not use it till you find the problem. The valve cover (over the valve springs), has a rubber tube, at least on the briggs engines. That tube could be shot. Or the cover loose. That cover should be near the muffler too. You are definately blowing oil from the crankcase pressure. so, unless you have a hole in the block, or a loose filler plug, I highly suspect that valve cover. A blown head gasket can most likely be ruled out or the mower wont run.
Do let us know what you find.
One of the many reasons why I still use my old lawnboy.....
True.
I enjoy the oil-fuel mix used in Lawnboys for a variety of reasons. Besides not having to worry about oil leaks, you don't have to worry about whether other family members are checking oil level before operating the mower. And, of course, you get more horsepower per cubic inch of engine with a 2-cycle design.
But, you can still have some "oil leak" situations. One common problem is a leaking seal on the driveshaft. Oil-gas mixture gets blown out onto the mower deck. The gas evaporates quickly, but the oil remains on the deck. This doesn't impact performance unless it is getting blown onto the drive belt of a self-propelled mower. A continual fine mist of oil being applied to the drive belt creates a very slippery and useless belt.
FYI, I've had Lawnboys for a while and I believe that in the past few years they addressed one of my biggest complaints, which was locating the exhaust under the mower deck. That made a much quieter mower, but the heat under the deck was bad for the grass and it often killed or weakened a circle of grass everytime the mower was stopped in one spot on the lawn. Plus the mufflers were not as robust and reliable as other designs and involved a lot more labor and expense to replace. Current Lawnboy models now have traditional mufflers.
Gideon
I took the engine shroud off this weekend.
The oil was not coming out from the head gasket (good) nor from any other part of the engine itself. (good)
The oil was coming out of the air cleaner box, part of that box has a tube to the crankcase and also an opening to the fan blower. This part of the air cleaner box is a separate compartment from the intake air filter. I guess the idea is the fan provides a positive pressure for crankcase ventilation. Apparently there was an accumulation of oil in this part of the air cleaner box and when I made a sharp turn, some of it spilled out onto the muffler. I'm not sure why there was a large accumulation of oil there but I cleaned it all out and all seems to be well now.
I should have mentioned earlier, this is a Tecumseh engine on a Sears riding mower.
thanks Mark
Is this an OHV engine ? I had a similar problem with a B&S intake engine that drove me nuts last year with oil in the Crab until I realized that the normal mode of head gasket failure on an ohv is to blow through to the cavity where the pushrods are thus pressurizing the crankcase. One telltale sign is that the smoking gets dramatically worst when you load the engine and more gas takes the easier crankcase route out BO
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