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A friend of mine has a Cub Cadet XT-1 with the Zongshen 547 cc Chinese engine. It had a slight oil leak that went unnoticed. The engine seized up. I can't find any parts on E-Bay or elsewhere. I was hoping to tear down the engine and see what is wrong with it. Need to get a gasket set. Anybody know anything about these engines? Any help would be appreciated.

Sincerely,

Texas Lawn Ranger

Need the model and serial numbers off the mower.

The riding mower is a strange bird. All I could find was a sticker on the hood.

Going to take a bit of time but I would bet a person could get a few pictures (especially with a ruler in the pix) and go to the big box stores and wherever else you might think of comparing to known engines and I bet there is a known engine with the same dimensions! Except for the head gasket all others can be made at home by hand only requiring a little skill and time THE CHINESE ARE NOT PEOPLE WITH ORIGINAL IDEAS AND ENGINEERING THEY LIKE TO COPY 1 case in point is look at the number of all the chinese clones of the Honda engines You would be better off to replace that chinese junk

A person is entitled to have their opinion and now you know mine Isn't the quest of those opinions why a thread is started

Might have to "bite the bullet" & go to a Cub Dealer.. I think they would have to have access to those parts.

By law they have to service parts available.
When you get it, take it to a bearing supplier and get another one.
They are all standard size parts and most likely metric.

As for Chinese parts in general.
They make what flag saluting Americans ask them to make.
It can cost millions to develop an engine from scratch.
But the patriotic American customer will not pay for that, they want cheap cheap ,cheap and quick.
So the cheapest way to do this is to make a copy of an existing engine or a variation to an existing engine.
In many cases the Chinese copy is actually better than the original.
We get a lot of AYP copy mowers fitted which Chinese Kohler Courage engines.
The RETAIL price is lower that the WHOLESALE price of a Courage engine from Kohler Aust.
The Chinese Courage engines are smoother running, use less fuel ( probably because they are a little smaller capacity ) and neither crack nor have cams that fall apart as does the genuine USA made Courage engines.

Cub use the Zoenchen engine because USA citizens will not pay the $ 50 extra it would cost to fit a Briggs, or the $ 80 more for a Kohler or the $ 100 more for the Kawasaki.
If you keep on buying the bottom line cheapest mower the mower companies will continue to source cheaper mowers till they come in as a knock down partially assembled mower which is the cheapest way to import ride ons.

Bert- Some times you go a step too far about Americans.

I'm a flag saluting American & proud of it. Did my Service.

7394 said:

Bert- Some times you go a step too far about Americans.

I'm a flag saluting American & proud of it. Did my Service.

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Buddy,

Australians are no better.
We sit here and bitch that "everything is made in China and is garbage" when the local companies who make highly durable, well made, very long service life, cheap to run & maintain mowers are going to the wall because their mowers are $ 2000 dearer than the junk Chinese imports or $ 500 dearer than the bottom line USA imported mowers.
Then we bitch that there are no jobs for our children when it is our own cheapskate attitudes & spending that has exported the jobs overseas.
We all put on our flag undies & T-shirts on Jan 26th and parade up & down the streets pretending to be proud & loyal Aussies then go out and sell the local businesses down the drain while blaming the countries we import from as being evil & underhanded.
Even worse it is not the Chinese companies targeting the USA or Australian industries, it is your & our own businessmen begging them to make cheaper products for them to get very rich importing products that will in the long run destroy the country.
But they will not be called out for the evil greedy selfish sub human species that they are.'They will be on the front pages of Time & Newsweek because they have made lots of money.
They will dine with the Generals & Admirals who commanded you , get welcomed into the White House with open arms while all the time destroying to country you were willing to lay down your life for.
However it is much easier to blame the undefended so in your case the Mexicans & South Americans that are the problem and over here it is the Asian migrants who have stolen all of the jobs, when in reality it is every one else who exported them.

Fighting on behalf of your country is a commendable thing to do but what is more important is SPENDING FOR YOUR COUNTRY.
If the customers bought the Kohler, Briggs or Kawasaki powered mowers and left the cheap Chinese engined ones on the floor then MTD would stop putting the Cheap Chinese copy engines in their mowers.
But people don't.
They buy the cheap when in reality most could easily afford the small extra amount that would be enough to keep industries turning over.
The population can destroy the country without firing a single shot by doing nothing more than opening their wallets.

Right now there is yet another "What is the best cheapest ride on" thread

Bert, I know exactly what you are getting at and don't take any of it personal. And sometimes the companies themselves are the reason for the chinese engines on american products. Did you know that MTD refused to use Briggs engines for about 3 years. The reason was Briggs purchased Murray from bankruptcy court, and MTD know longer saw Briggs as an engine manufacturer, but as a mower manufacturing competitor.

At this point Murray mowers sold at walmart are manufactured by MTD using Briggs engines. Brute by Briggs tillers and yard edgers are manufactured, serviced and warrantied by Ardisam/earthquake, and the parts diagram on the Brutepower website list incorrect part numbers for some of the parts.. Brute log splitters are manufactured/warrantied through YTL International, Poulan Pro battery pushmowers are warranty and serviced through Greenworks service centers.

Rato/Loncin/LCT engines used on Husqvarna products are serviced/parts supplied and warrantied by Husqvarna because they are considered Husvarna engines. Actually had a case of a LCT engine on a Poulan Pro snowthrower last winter where I had the LCT part numbers but my LCT distributor didn't have them in stock and was not allowed to backorder the parts.

mikebarber said:

Going to take a bit of time but I would bet a person could get a few pictures (especially with a ruler in the pix) and go to the big box stores and wherever else you might think of comparing to known engines and I bet there is a known engine with the same dimensions! Except for the head gasket all others can be made at home by hand only requiring a little skill and time THE CHINESE ARE NOT PEOPLE WITH ORIGINAL IDEAS AND ENGINEERING THEY LIKE TO COPY 1 case in point is look at the number of all the chinese clones of the Honda engines You would be better off to replace that chinese junk

A person is entitled to have their opinion and now you know mine Isn't the quest of those opinions why a thread is started

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I agree

I don't take anything personally and do not intend to make anything personal either.

However when ever I see people going on about bad imported products it is worthwhile to point out that they are usually the reason , not the victim .

It is even worse down here because we are paid substantially better than than equivalent workers in the USA so we have no excuse for exporting jobs.
A good quality Aussie made ride on is around $ 6000 and will run for 30 years but the last two standing, just merged because they can not sell enough mowers to run the 4 factories.
I repair more poor quality house branded AYP mowers than any other single brand and to be honest I would not pay $ 100 for them.
But they look like a Husky and are $ 2000 as compared to the real Huskies at $ 5000.
Then when I can no longer hold the junk piles together they go out & buy a Chinese Husky copy for $1599.99 which is just over the average weekly wage $ 75,000/pa.
Then the same person bitches at me because I have a 3 week turn around so I should take their son who has not had a job for the past 3 years on as an apprentice.
No excuse for us at all we can all afford it but are too selfish to do the right thing by our country.

The major supermarkets starting selling milk at $ 1.00/ litre ( just short of a quart).
It costs the dairy farmers $ 1.65 / litre to produce the milk , farm gate price.
So the good citizens of Australia sold out our dairy farmers to save $ 10/ week while spending $ 75 / week on lotteries , another $ 300/ week on slot machines and heaven only knows how much on horses & sports betting.
While they are of course average per capita amounts it still says something about the mentality of consumers.

I see exactly the same mentality on a large number of the posts here, this one in particular.
If the OP did not want a Chinese engined mower he could have bought one with a USA made engine, there are plenty to choose from, right now, but won't be for long.

The most powerful force in the economy is compound interest.
The second most powerful force is the internal dollar, be it within a business, a family or a country

Bert- I had a bad day & let it spill over here, not cool. Sorry excuse, but I apologize.

No need ever to appologise to me.
We are all people not machines so we all have emotions .
And if nothing more it gave me an oppertunity to do a little venting.
Hopefully it might make a few people have a little think about purchasing decisions.
From the day most of us were born we were bombarded by propergander elevating the virtues of a free market economy and in particular how it would deliver everything we could ever want at a price we could easily afford.
Remember, capitalism was king we would all be living in luxury doing almost no work and living a good life.
Never quite happened did it.
Well it did happen, but only for 0.01% of the population, those who were on the controlling end of the system.
The USA is in the same boat as we are.
Standards of living are now going down to such an extent that in the USA life expectency is actually going down.

There is nothing wrong with capitalism, it has a lot of good things going for it but there must be limits and boundaries .
If not the ultimate end is a single monopoly which controls everything, a theme of many a horror science fiction / future prediction movies.

Before the government got into bed with very big business things like competition commissions & anti trust laws, anti monopoly laws were enacted and enforced.
This stopped happening some time around the 80's when "GREED WAS GOOD", executive wages went from simple % above the worker wages to mulipules and then factors of the wages of the people who actually make the profits.

Then I see really sick marketing schemes like what Lowes do by offering ex-service people , police, emergency service personnel pretend discounts.
Now while it is actually less money than the family owned business Rivets or Illengine work for, Lowes are still making a substantially higher profit than either of the 2 dealers by bludging on their provision of parts & services which are nowhere nears as profitable as a strait retail sale and only stocking the popular fast moving items. Not the complete range of anything.
Then you add to that most dealers will have paid for the floor stock before it is sold where as a business the size of Lowes will not pay for for the mower you bought till weeks if not months after your money is in their bank account.
When companies get to this size, which competition theory dictated they would never ever get to they are in a position to dictate the price that the factory has to charge them for the mowers.
This forces the mower company to either run at an unsustainable loss or degrade the product they are selling.
Degrading the quality and in particular the service life of the mower is exactly what Lowes want them to do because with their marketing plan, you see them as the HERO because they "saved" you money so when the mower dies, you blame the mower factory, not the real criminal and go back to Lowes to buy another at a big discount and thus they cycle continues till no local factory can meet the price Lowes will pay so they end up rebadging 100% imported mowers after sacking thousands of workers because you don't need many people to peel of the Hi Fool Yoo stickers & replace them with Husqvarna ones .

Now I have signalled out Lowes for no reason other than the way the marketing discounts has created such an amount of loyality to them and so may people come on here and sing their praises.
The other big boxes, HF , Walmart etc are ultimately just as bad for the economy, none of them are doing anything good for the country.
And I will not talk of the businesses that are now considered to be "too big to be allowed to fail" when one of the pillars that the free market capitalist system is built on is the prospect of a badly run business failing which creates oppertunities for better run ones to enter the market or elevate their position in the market.

Better stop because the moderators will end up tossing me or the thread off due to ban on politics.
And for all those who would like to call me a pinko liberal, remember I work for myself, have run other peoples companies & have run my own companies for 30 years.

bertsmobile1 said:

Then I see really sick marketing schemes like what Lowes do by offering ex-service people , police, emergency service personnel pretend discounts.
Now while it is actually less money than the family owned business Rivets or Illengine work for, Lowes are still making a substantially higher profit than either of the 2 dealers by bludging on their provision of parts & services which are nowhere nears as profitable as a strait retail sale and only stocking the popular fast moving items. Not the complete range of anything.
Then you add to that most dealers will have paid for the floor stock before it is sold where as a business the size of Lowes will not pay for for the mower you bought till weeks if not months after your money is in their bank account.

Click to expand...

Here is an example of what these companies do to their dealers. As a Poulan Pro service center I can also sell the wholegoods. A couple of years ago I got my dealer price list for their products, and the pricing for the dealers seemed like a decent profit for the dealer such as myself. So Just for comparison I went to my local big box store that also sold Poulan Pro products to compare prices.

I looked at a Z turn that was on the store floor and also what was on my price list. The local box store was selling the Z turn for $200 under my dealer cost. And they were selling Poulan Pro chainsaws for $1 over my cost.

Walmart a few years ago had a contract with a bicycle manufacturer that they were to produce like half million bikes for Walmart, and part of the contract was if the company didn't meet their production deadline that Walmart didn't have to pay for anything that had already been shipped and sold. Company went bankrupt because they were like 5000 bikes short.

Thanks Bert....