did it using method 2 solved the problem
thanks for all the help you guys are great
AC
Then this likely means you were setting the valves at top dead center before.
You can't do this on a Briggs & Stratton engine but this is the way you said it on most other engines especially kohler, honda, Kawasaki and all of the newer Chinese import engines I have seen.
Anyone who says they prefer the second method of one valve being open and setting the one that's closed simply is trying to reinvent the wheel and I don't know why they have so much problem doing it the way Briggs recommends.
It's very simple.
You turn the engine over by hand until you get to TDC on the compression stroke.
Then you continue to turn the engine clockwise while looking down at the top of the flywheel until the Piston goes down at least 1/4 of an inch.. I just say a half inch to 1 in since you don't want to risk not getting past the compression release.
In fact, you can go two and a half or three inches and you're still on the base circle of the cam.
As long as you don't go almost to all the way to the bottom of the stroke nothing will happen but if you were to go too far the exhaust valve will start to open so that would not be set correctly.
The beautiful part about doing it this correct and recommended way is you will find that the engine has a natural spot when you're turning it by hand or it just kind of stops right past hotbed center and frankly this is always a little bit more than a quarter inch down.
It's probably more like an inch and a quarter but like I said it's all the same at that point.
So I can literally close my eyes and just turn it by hand and feel where the engine wants to stop and the valves are ready to set.
The hardest part about adjusting these valves are any valves on these small engines is tightening up the lock nut and getting the final adjustment not to move when you're trying to lock it into place.
This is probably due to the extremely soft metal involved especially with the rocker arm shaft.
It usually takes me two or three times tightening the lock nut or sometimes I snug the lot nut and then actually tighten the adjustment nut just a little bit to lock things into place but once I get the adjustment right I always turn the engine over by hand three or four times and put it back in the proper position past top dead center and check it once more.
When I first started working on these a couple of decades ago, I tried to set the valves like you would in an automotive engine and of course it would not start! Lol
I've been looked up and found you're supposed to do it the quarter inch past top dead center and I found that it didn't make a difference so I would go a little further until that natural stop in the engine.
It pained me to read that you took the engine apart to check the camshaft after it would not start.
I am extremely big on diagnostic procedures and I never do anything, take anything apart, or replace any parts until I'm absolutely certain or at least 98.7% certain that is the problem.
It's certainly okay to take one apart of each style engine so you can explore around and know exactly how things are working but as far as repairs, I'm into efficiency.
Understanding how these things work does help a lot. That's why I say it doesn't matter as long as you go one quarter inch past top dead center even if you go two and a half inches, it's still the same because when you've had one apart and watched how the camshaft and the ACR works, it will make sense and as long as you're on the base circle of the camshaft and the ACR is not holding the intake valve open, it makes no difference.
When I was young and first started working on cars, I always obsessed about the number one spark plug being on the proper terminal of the distributor because some of the old ones actually had a mark that said number one or a dot.
I had an engine builder tell me that I didn't matter where you put number one and my jaw dropped because I did not understand.
He told me "You and put number one in the trunk!"
He was right. You can put the whole distributor in the trunk and spend it with a rechargeable drill if you had to wait to spin it at just the right speeds and in sync with the firing order. Lol
The position of number one doesn't matter as you could lift up the distributor on most cars and use every single terminal to make it number one and just re-clock the wires around the cap and it would run exactly the same.
This is called thinking out of the box and I just didn't know enough about how these things actually worked to be able to think out of the box and realize that a lot of things really don't matter.
