Is the Kohler Courage really that bad?

[Rocky J]

I have had a single cylinder Courage that the bolts came loose on top and it cracked the block at 68 hours, the good was the internal parts brought a fortune on EBAY, I replaced it with a Kohler Command Vertical 16, shorten a few wires and lengthen a few and a homemade header pipe to connect the exhaust. I still have a Courage Twin cylinder on the TroyBuilt RZT and I push it hard and it takes it fine ,has close to 200 hours on it.

 

[bertsmobile1]

I have read all the pages of this conversation and just wanted to add to it. I have a 2007 Cub SLT1550 with the Courage SV730 engine in it. It has 700 hrs on it and so far I have had no major problems with it. I change oil and filter every 50 hrs [ I use Tractor Supply 30 HD ], a little MMO in each change and occasionally a little amount of Seafoam in the gas tank. I keep the tractor and engine clean and occasionally I take off the plastic engine shroud to blow the dust from under the flywheel and clean the air fins.It has no oil leaks and runs as good as it did when new.
The only problem I have had with it is hard starting. The starter doesn't have enough torque to turn the engine past the compression stroke when cold. I have Installed a bigger CCA battery. All cables and connections are tight and in good shape. There seems to be an argument as to whether this engine has ACR or not. I have done the valve adjustment and it didn't help. It may explode tomorrow but otherwise it's been a good machine.
Anyway just my 2 cents worth, nicky

Buy a couple of rocker cover gaskets then next time you take the blower housing off and the motor is stone cold, adjust the valve lash.
Your symptoms are typical of the gap on the exhaust valve getting too big so the engine does not decompress enough for the starter to crank the engine.
I get a dozen of mowers like this every season, usually after the owner has
1) fitted a bigger battery
2) replaced the starter
3) replaced the solenoid
4) been jump starting it for a season or two.

When you refit the gasket, fut some sealant on the cover side ( I like Hylomar ) and heavy axle grease on the engine side.
This way it will strip clean and won't leak.
Do not overtighten the gasket, the bolts really only barely get tightened past finger tight or you cut the gasket & distort the rocker cover and it will leak.

If you are servicing by book hours you check the valve lash every second oil filter ( around 200 hrs ) and please check those front 4 engine cover bolts every time you pull that blower housing off

 

[nicky1]

I have done the valve adjustment cold. I check it every spring. As for the cover bolts I removed the Flywheel 3 or 4 yrs ago put a little dab of breakaway strength thread lock on all those bolts and torqued them to specs after hearing all the horror stories of them coming loose and trashing the engine.
Thanks for the input, nicky

 

[Bushy]

Yes!!!

 

[ChrisBFRPKY]

Kohler Courage single cylinder engines are worse than bad, they were and are poorly designed junk. I took the time to register here to get this message out and put my .02 cents on the record as well. I've seen some defending the Kohler Courage engine in this thread and I have no doubt Kohler pays a service like "Reputation Defender" to go online and pour water on any hot spots about that engine. So let's just get this over with now. Kohler's design was a flop. From the paper thin aluminum block casting to the internal syncro balance they "borrowed" from Briggs. Vibration vibration vibration, leads to loose bolts, leads to flywheel to engine bolt contact and then engine block destruction. Now let's say the average Joe consumer maintains his engine above average. Changes the oil every 15 to 20 hours, uses the best synthetic oil money can buy, performs valve adjustments, carb cleaning and changes filters all as a matter of routine all in hopes of preventing problems down the road. After all Joe doesn't make a lot of money and he wants to protect the investment he made on that new Cub Cadet because it has to last. His buddy bought one a few weeks earlier than Joe and Joe wants to make sure his outlasts his buddy's. With all that loving care of his engine Joe's surely going to get a long service life out of his investment right? Wrong. When the poorly designed balance system decides one day to just free itself and escape thru the rear of the engine block, Joe learns something important about the Kohler Courage single cylinder engine. Now while Joe is nursing his second degree burns from the hot engine oil that splashed his feet and ankles, (yes Joe usually mows in sandles) he starts to research his engine online and finds he is not alone. It wasn't a fluke, it was a Kohler Courage. It's a common documented design failure of the Kohler Courage single cylinder engines. As luck would have it Joe's engine was just outside of the warranty period so no help from Kohler or Cub Cadet. Joe is just glad the engine exploded on him and not his wife or son who could have been just as likely using the mower at the time the Kohler Courage went. Exploding engines during normal operation, that's what Joe now thinks about all of Kohler's engine products. Oh they used to make some great engines back during the old cast iron K series days but now I wouldn't walk near to one while it's in use. The Kohler Courage single cylinder engines are grenades and the minute you start them you may pull the pin. All ended well enough for Joe, as it turned out his buddy's engine went the same way his did. It exploded out the back of the block. So Joe replaced the Kohler scrap iron engine with an old single cylinder vertical Briggs engine, a used one from the 1990's with a syncro balance system that actually works. He still uses the Cub Cadet weekly and pleasantly notices that even though the 16.5HP Briggs engine has a smaller HP rating it has more power than the 20HP Kohler Courage single ever did! So Joe says whenever you're looking at a new or used riding mower, lift the hood. If it says "Kohler Courage" RUN AWAY! DON'T WALK, RUN AWAY! If it is running at the time, your life is in danger. Now it's a free Country so if you choose to go ahead with your Kohler Courage purchase and decide to roll the dice for whatever reason (death wish, tired of living, terminal cancer) Joe says this is the engine that may put you out of your misery. Otherwise, if you want to live, at least wear a full array of safety equipment and steel toe boots up to your hips.

 

[ILENGINE]

Chris your post has so much misinformation it is a figment of your imagination. Yes there was loose cover bolts issues, Yes there was some early starter issues, and yes they had some counterbalance issues. Most were ;limited to the first series of engines, and after getting the bolt torque corrected didn't see the loose cover bolt issues after that. And to make it right to the customers that had purchased that engines Kohler even extended the engine several years past the normal warranty expiration date for the counterbalance issue to cover the engine failures. Basically if the customer could produce his original purchase receipt they covered it under warranty for a replacement short block.

And just so you know the 5400 series uses the same bucket engine style block that uses counterbalance shafts instead of the sliding weight like Briggs,

 

[bertsmobile1]

I always love a conspiracy theory being tossed in because some do not take some ones line of arguement hook line & sinker.
So yes there were some problems with the engine but Kohler made the effort to rectify them for a very long time after normal warranty had run out.
I believe it was 4 years in the USA
Add to that it was a random fault .
I have better than 50 Husqvarna mowers in my service run all fitted with Courages .
Now I have a sneaky that these were dumped down into Aus the same way Husqvarna dumped all the pro-Riders that flipped because they were sold here at a big discount.
Of those 50 or so 2 developed the Kohler crack and probably 5 or 6 had loose bolts when they came in for service which as with Nicky 1 said a couple of drops of blue loctite and problem was solved.
Six of them are used commercially and all of those now have between 1000 & 2000 hours on them with no problems other than the hydros getting very tired ( got one in for repair right now ) .
Yet to see one with a tossed counter weight, a system that has been in use on single cylinders for near 100 years , so no Briggs did not invent it so no Kohler did not steal it from them .
I am sorry that you obviously had problems with your Courage but your rantings are some what out of place.
See I am not Joe Average I am Berts Mobile Mower Repairs and started my professional career as a a Foundry Metallurgist so unlike Joe IGNORANT I do know a thing or two about castings.
And there is nothing wrong with the casting it is an excellent design , in fact the entire engine is an excellent design as I do not get burned 20 times a day from hot oil gushing from an oil filter mounted horizontally in an inaccessable place that has to be removed by hand .
The top closure plate means I can fix Joe Not Too Cheap's mower for $ 120 less than the equivalent Briggs because it can stay in the mower for a decompressor change and I certainly can not do that with the 6 ( on average ) 31 series Briggs cams I fit every year ( when Briggs finally decides to supply them ) and 2 to 3 4000 series cams that seem to wear round
A blower housing that comes off with 4 x 6mm bolts all pointing directly upward so you do not have to remove the fuel tank in order to remove the blower housing to CLEAN THE ENGINE EVERY SEASON which if Joe Average actually did, then chances are he would have noticed the loose bolts, that is of course assuming he was not on his 10 Bud while doing it . A painful job to do on any B & S engine requiring a 3/8 spannar , because you can not get a socket or gear wrench onto the rear bolts then either a 3/8 or T40 for the fronts,that is of course if the casting has not broken away and some time an additional 5/16 + phillips if he blower housing is under a bigger blower housing so the SV engine can pretend to look like an OHV engine and of course the 1/4" to remove the fuel pump.
That is not good design , it is minimum fastener price design to make the engine as cheap as humanly possible and a PIA for Joe Average to service.
The Kohler top cover comes of again with easy to access bolts all the same size & T 27 to slip the throttle control off .

Having had a very close examination of the entire casting, before welding the cracks and being, an experienced non-ferrous foundry person I would guess and it is just a guess that the engine was originally designed to use the same forged crankshaft as is fitted to the command .
This would be sound engineering practice as a forged crankshaft is around1/3 the cost of the entire engine so using the same one would have brought in big economies of scale.
However some one decided to fit a cheaper malleable cast iron crankshaft which has to be substantially thicker than the equivalent strength forged one but only 1/2 the price.
This would have thrown the vibration dynamics for the engine way out , thus the loosening front bolts and of course gobbled up a lot of the potential power from the engine .

The Courage engines are still being made in Kohlers Chinese factory and we get lots of cheap chinese Husqvarna knock offs fitted with 21 Hp courage singles that run like a dream.
I have about a dozen of them in the service run and they are actually a cut above the USA made ones.
Don't know if the crank is cast or forged because I am yet to pull a top cover off any of them , but the engine does run smoother and seems to respond to the governor much faster.

And by the way using synthetic oil in an engine not designed to run synthetic oil can destroy the engine in no time flat particularly if it is a lighter grade because the synthetics flow smoother so they don't hold critical oil pressure when uses in engines that have pressure fed cranks designed to run on the heavier mono grade or standard multi grades oils . Synthetics also splash quite differently so can be a problem getting to little ends on vertical shaft engines and they tend to drain faster from the top bearing oil dam on full splash engine making them more prone to siezing when being driven on slopes.
And this is an OBSERVED FACT coming from diagnosing destroyed engine running on full synthetic oil, cause Joe Average thinks he knows more about oil than the engineers who designed the engine .

And NO I AM NOT A KOHLER STOOGE, I am a certified kohler technicain ( via the on line course only ) but do not have any affiliation with Kohler as they demanded I keep a $ 30,000 Kohler inventory in order to open an account which I have no intention of doing.
Which is anything makes me alitle pisse at Kohler for making me wste several hour of my time siting their on line exam .
And I definately am not a paid "Reputation Defender" I am a plain speaking Aussie
And to me you just seem like a person which a very bad case of Schit on the Liver desperate to vent their spleen at every oppertunity.
And if you were really mowing in open toed shoes then an idiot to boot .
Exactly how boiling hot oil would manage to escape from the crankcase magically bypass the dash turret then deep fry you feet is again beyond my imagination as if the counterweight let go it would be near impossible for it to go through the side of the engine unless some one had been tampering with the governor & had the engine reving way over the 5000 rpm safe limit.

 

[StarTech]

I agree Kohler initially had design problems which as company did the right thing in taking care of the problems by making good the bad engines. I have several Courage singles under my wing too and have only seen one with loose closure plate screws which I caught in time to prevent any serious damage. Kohler since re-enforced the cylinder to crankcase area which has prevented many of the previous problems.

The only real problem I had lately is the Courage single develop surging issues related to governor wear which I have found tweaking the static governor adjustment solves that problem. The only other problem is that rocker cover with the cork gasket that likes to leak which is resolved by using RTV.

BTW, I am only an independent shop owner and tech. As Berts put it there is no reason to have 30K in Kohler parts so I am not even going to try to get to the dealer level.

 

[Scrubcadet10]

I check the top cover bolts with a wrench once a month, and that's when I clean the cooling fins, 5 minutes can save tons of headaches. It also gives me something to do
While the oil is draining.

 

[ChrisBFRPKY]

Chris your post has so much misinformation it is a figment of your imagination. Yes there was loose cover bolts issues, Yes there was some early starter issues, and yes they had some counterbalance issues. Most were ;limited to the first series of engines, and after getting the bolt torque corrected didn't see the loose cover bolt issues after that. And to make it right to the customers that had purchased that engines Kohler even extended the engine several years past the normal warranty expiration date for the counterbalance issue to cover the engine failures. Basically if the customer could produce his original purchase receipt they covered it under warranty for a replacement short block.

And just so you know the 5400 series uses the same bucket engine style block that uses counterbalance shafts instead of the sliding weight like Briggs,

Earning that Kohler pay are we? Well in fact everything I said above is well documented. The Kohler company even extended engine warranty to 5 years from 2 and they also had a special program for customers who had engines that grenaded in such a matter to send them a brand new short block. So facts are facts and slinging mud is a dirty business. But by all means don't take my word on it, verify......you have the internet I'll bet you have Google do yourself a favor and get educated. Of course you likely already are and are just attempting to spin this post in your direction. Guess what it didn't work. The Kohler Courage single cylinder engine has a proven and documented design flaw, Kohler extended warranties and offered replacement short blocks for a reason......They don't give stuff away without cause and without reason. You can't spin the facts and facts are exactly what I posted. Next.