l008com
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- Joined
- May 25, 2015
- Threads
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- 123
I have a very old (1994) Craftsman yard vacuum. I use it every fall to suck up/mulch piles of leaves, and once in a while I use it to chip sticks if I have a large branch that falls. Attached is a photo so you can see the engine configuration. Nothing unusual.
So here is the symptom: Every time I start it up, it spits out a big cloud of... what looks to me to be mostly white smoke. I actually have this on video, let me know if it would be useful to see and I'll post it. This machine has only been mine for a few years, but since I've owned it, I've always changed the oil every spring, I always use 0w-30 full synthetic, I always use fuel that has a little bit of seafoam in it, and when it's done for the year, I spray fogging oil in the cylinder and pack it away. NOTE: the cloud of smoke is NOT the fogging oil. Even once I've used the machine for an hour, if I use it again a week or two later, I still get a big cloud of smoke.
Once the cloud goes away in a few seconds, it seems to run clean. Very clean in fact. Little smoke at all, possibly zero smoke.
So I am trying to understand what the smoke is. I always just assume it's burning oil. But the oil "pan" is under the cylinder, so it doesn't make sense that oil would be leaking in there. And it goes away right away. If the engine has a bad seal, wouldn't it constantly burn oil while running but not particularly be prone to a big cloud at startup?
But then if not oil, what else? There aren't many things inside that engine. There's gas, there's oil, that's about it.
I've always expected that if I keep the fuel and oil nice and clean and fresh, that eventually the cloud would stop happening but it hasn't changed. And it's not like this one puff of smoke is the end of the world, but I'd still like to understand what is going on with it when it happens.
So here is the symptom: Every time I start it up, it spits out a big cloud of... what looks to me to be mostly white smoke. I actually have this on video, let me know if it would be useful to see and I'll post it. This machine has only been mine for a few years, but since I've owned it, I've always changed the oil every spring, I always use 0w-30 full synthetic, I always use fuel that has a little bit of seafoam in it, and when it's done for the year, I spray fogging oil in the cylinder and pack it away. NOTE: the cloud of smoke is NOT the fogging oil. Even once I've used the machine for an hour, if I use it again a week or two later, I still get a big cloud of smoke.
Once the cloud goes away in a few seconds, it seems to run clean. Very clean in fact. Little smoke at all, possibly zero smoke.
So I am trying to understand what the smoke is. I always just assume it's burning oil. But the oil "pan" is under the cylinder, so it doesn't make sense that oil would be leaking in there. And it goes away right away. If the engine has a bad seal, wouldn't it constantly burn oil while running but not particularly be prone to a big cloud at startup?
But then if not oil, what else? There aren't many things inside that engine. There's gas, there's oil, that's about it.
I've always expected that if I keep the fuel and oil nice and clean and fresh, that eventually the cloud would stop happening but it hasn't changed. And it's not like this one puff of smoke is the end of the world, but I'd still like to understand what is going on with it when it happens.
