John Deere LX188 problem

[Steve K]

I have an 8 year old LX188.

I've had zero problems with it until now. At first it took about 45 minutes of mowing for it to begin stalling/cutting out. I could restart it but it would just keep stalling after that.

Now it only takes 5-10 minutes for it to begin stalling. When it stalls, it just immediately stalls. It sort of loses power right before so I can kind of tell when it's going to happen. I'll restart and go forward 10 feet and it will stall again. It happens with the mower engaged. With the mower disengaged I drove around my yard quite a bit before it stalled again. So with the mower on, it happens MUCH more quickly. So before I send it off to a John Deere service center I thought I'd try to tackle this myself. I'm not that good with knowing an engine inside and out but I certainly could change a part if needed. A guy I talked to (who owns his own lawmower repair shop, but can't get parts for John Deere) said it sounds like the spark plug coil.

So here are my questions:

1. With this model there are two spark plugs so I'm assuming there are two coils? How do I know which one might be bad, do I just change both?

1. I thought the coil was just one part that I could buy and reinstall. I looked up this part on the John Deere web site and came upon a page that shows an exploded view (about 20 separate parts) of the ignition coil. You can buy each individual part if you want but here is where I became completely confused, if you can't just buy the ignition coil as one piece how the heck would I know which one of those 20 parts to buy?

2. Does this even sound like it's the coil that's the problem?

Thanks for any help.

[Tony Hwang]

Hi, Wonder if ign. module is failing. Becomes intermittent by heat and eventually it'll quit. Just one possibility. Check the spark when it happens. Another is air(vac) leak in the fuel poassage.

[m Ransley]

Could be the coil, but there are 2 and you said it dies suddenly, maybe the ignition module.

[halatos2000]

Losing power slowly tends to implicate a fuel supply problem rather than an ignition problem. If there is a filter between the tank and the carburetor I would replace it. It sounds like slow fuel starvation either due to a dirty carburetor or a plugged fuel filter to me. Either problem is rather simple to take care of, if you need to check the carburetor shut off the fuel and remove the bowl. If you see sediment in there you need to pull the carburetor out and clean it.

Chris

[Steve K]

Well I may have described that wrong. I just changed the fuel filter. Most times it doesn't lose power before it quits, it just instantly quits. Other times I can sense when it's gonna quit because I lose a tiny bit of power right before it quits.

But even so, the carburetor may need a cleaning. I emptied the gas tank because there was this dark oil-like stuff hanging out/floating at the bottom of the gas tank. So that may have gotten in the carb?

[Ralph Mowery]

I bought a new Deere about 2 years ago. It would run and then cut off. They replaced the seat and it ran fine after that. YOu may try bypassing the seat switch and see if that helps.