LOL. I have not found anything nice online about the Courage. Thanks, everyone. The oil level was fine, not overfull. No sign of gas in the oil. Other than the motor, the mower is in great shape. I hate to scrap it and buy new. How feasible would it be to swap motors? It's a Husqvarna YTH21K46.
The bucket engine was a breakthrough model for Kohler and one of the best designs I have seen in decades.
It was designed to be 100% machine assembled and is still the only ride on engine that gives you easy and CLEAN access to the oil filter.
Because the closure plate is up the top as is the governor there is nothing to leak down the bottom and the engine will run at the greatest angle of any vertical shaft engine before oil starvation kills a rod.
Likle all new designs they had a few teething problems
1) because of a change in crankshaft material from forged steel to malleable iron they had to use a bigger heavier counter weight.
This created different vibration charasterics resulting is SOME engines loosening the front bolts & the block cracking.
This was corrected by the application of loc-tite to the offending bolts.
A lot of mechanics failed to engage the top of the cam shaft properly causing cam gear failures then blamed the plastic gears.
There were some failure of the ACR mechanism on some of the exhaust cams.
Because the big box nearest me was a Husqvarna dealer & because of the high price of importing mowers to OZ nearly all of the Huskies they sold were fitted with Kohlers .
I have seen 3 faulty engines , ar less but probably the same percentage wise as Briggs Intek failures .
Apart from the Murrays which are fitted with Chinese made Briggs engines, all the cheap Chinese ride ons we get here are all fitted with the Kohler bucket engines and because Kohler USA had found all of the issues with the engines, none of the Chinese made Kohlers have given my customers a single second of problems.
