Kohler engines is no more.

Tiger Small Engine said:

It must have been the board of directors for Kohler that wanted to rebrand and change the long standing name. Keep an eye on the quality and parts availability and how warranty is handled on the new Rehlko name. Hopefully no major problems occur.

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I will be honest. I have my reservations about this whole thing, since this is starting to line up with trying to distance themselves from prior commitments. So I wouldn't be surprised if they change the name and basically quietly stop support of products built prior to say 2020. I and @starlink can both speak to the fact that when Kohler moved their parts and support website from Kohler plus to Kohler partners there are a ton of engine models and spec numbers that were not included on purpose.

I know there is a lot of the specs not on Partners and have had to ask for IPLs to sent to me that I can't find anywhere. Very frustrating to say the least when working on engines.

I am kind of glad that I will be ending my support for customer equipment repairs in the near future as it is just getting to be too much of a hassle getting parts and info. These dang financial investment companies are screwing everything up. All they are looking for is the fast buck and when something is slow moving they just dump it.

We just lost the Snapper and Simplicity lines this year because these financial investment companies.

And doesn't help when distributors like Gardner changes the user's interface and refuses to fix the problems it creating. Instead they want to run two different systems at the same time. If wasn't for them being the sole Tuff Torq distributor I probably would already dumped them.

Hammermechanicman said:

As much as i hate to admit it i have had good results with china parts on honda GX engines. Got a complete cylinder head off ebay for $44. Looks identical to the OEM. Bolted on and works perfect. I have installed like 20 honda style china carbs with no issues. Same for recoils. I have put a few predator engines on as repowers and no issues. OEM honda parts are expensive so i use china parts. I have put dozens of china carbs on handhelds. Most with no issues. Just put an aftermarket piston and rod in a briggs 17.5hp. Rings, piston and rod looked as good as OEM. Is china getting better or is the brand names getting worse?

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A lot of the treasured OEM parts are made in China and/or assembled in Mexico. And that's for about anything for any piece of equipment.

Don't do much work on Honda engines. Distributor s##ks. Can get parts through other sources at times. Honda carbs are so cheap it doesn't pay to work on them just replace. Any way their parts look up s##ks as well.

And just think depending on who gets in the White House next year these Chinese parts are going to cost a lot more next year due to increased tariffs. And the long shore worker strike that is depending is not going to help a bit either. It will be a triple whammy on us all.

It like everytime the minimum wage is increased to help the workers everything goes up and eat it all up and then some. What the point raising the minimum wage if it doesn't actually help.

I don't want to start a fight or anything but here's the logic of increasing tariffs. The logic is if we increase tariffs, it costs foreign countries more to sell their crap to us, but also means that manufacturing stuff in China is More expensive, Discouraging big companies from having their items made low quality in China, and instead, to make their products in the us in better quality.

Craftsman Garage said:

I don't want to start a fight or anything but here's the logic of increasing tariffs. The logic is if we increase tariffs, it costs foreign countries more to sell their crap to us, but also means that manufacturing stuff in China is More expensive, Discouraging big companies from having their items made low quality in China, and instead, to make their products in the us in better quality.

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This where the confusion starts. Tariffs sound great until you look into who actually ends up paying them.

Yes initially they pay but the fees just get tack on the price the next one in line that buys the items pays. From there every middle man tacks on even more as it travels thru the supply chain. Here I take my cost including shipping and other fees and mark up 35 percent using gross profit markup formula.

Example. If an item was $100 and the 10% tariff is added it them costs me $110. Well using my markup formula $100 item that was retailed for $153.85 now becomes $169.23 for the my customer. So that 10% tariff is actually raise the retail price by $15.38 by the time it get to my customer in the retail price.

So if that item gets says a 30% tariff then it becomes a $200 item. So if look at it is not the part source that pays the tariff and more but it is the final consumer that pays a heavier price. In this example the $30 tariff causes the enduser basically paying $46.15 over the previous retail price. So enduser actually pay more than whatever tariff percentage is. They get it back as they sell the items as they tack it on the sale price. And as a business I can't absorb these increases either so they just get passed along to the next buyer. So if a domestic vendor becomes cheaper overall then they get the order otherwise they don't as most usually just raise their prices too.

Even when my vendors providing price files I have to adjust some the prices in order to make a profit.

For what it's worth, these are the companies there were under the Kohler Power umbrella when Platinum Equity made the purchase from the Kohler family last year. As you can see, it included engines, both gasoline and diesel, and Power Systems which was Kohler's generator and controls division. The Kohler family still owns the plumbing and hospitality portions. I believe Kohler furniture was sold several years ago.

For now, according to my source, there are no plans to change the Kohler Engines name. That would be foolish IMO.

They've pretty much gotten rid of anyone who knows anything so who knows. With any luck, they will return service and education to the Central Distributors.

Hopefully they do better with the Kohler purchase than they did with the Tecumseh purchase.

VegetiveSteam said:

For what it's worth, these are the companies there were under the Kohler Power umbrella when Platinum Equity made the purchase from the Kohler family last year. As you can see, it included engines, both gasoline and diesel, and Power Systems which was Kohler's generator and controls division. The Kohler family still owns the plumbing and hospitality portions. I believe Kohler furniture was sold several years ago.

For now, according to my source, there are no plans to change the Kohler Engines name. That would be foolish IMO.

They've pretty much gotten rid of anyone who knows anything so who knows. With any luck, they will return service and education to the Central Distributors.

Hopefully they do better with the Kohler purchase than they did with the Tecumseh purchase.

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So the kohler power group (the umbrella) could be renamed Relkoh, but still manufacture Kohler engines. ?

Scrubcadet10 said:

So the kohler power group (the umbrella) could be renamed Relkoh, but still manufacture Kohler engines

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Exactly, yes. Changing the name of the parent company is one thing, but changing the well-known names of the entities under the new parent wouldn't make sense.