Is the Kohler Courage really that bad?

[Scrubcadet10]

why.....do you.....always have to type so much..... ?

Bert's a smart man, and i do not mean that sarcastically

 

[bertsmobile1]

Logert.
On the web all people should be equal and anything posted should be considered opinion .
That being the case when one needs to make a point one has to explain how they arrived at the point.
This then allows skepitcs & dissenters the oppertunity to check what has been printed and come to their own conclusions .
I could be a person trained in Applied sciences with multiple degrees and even more post graduate diplomas
or
I could be a cheeky 12 year old girl who gets her jollies by pretending to be some one else & fooling lots of people.

It is up to the reader to decide .
That is why I have a plain avatar and no signature line so what is written can be challenged , and hopefully it does get challenged because I am not always right but once challenged & convinced that I am wrong I then have the oppertunity to change my opinion thus become right .
Science students are taught from the very start that all "facts , rules & laws" are only correct till proven other wise at which time they become myths to be replaced by the new " facts, rules & laws ".
Religions & poltics are the only entities that demmand they be the absolute unquestionable truth and that leads to conflict when one can not admit that they night not have been as correct as they first believed.
The above is written with due respect to all with hard line political beliefs and deep religious convictions.
In a free world you have the right to believe what you want to .

 

[ChrisBFRPKY]

My Cub Cadet is 2010 year model,

Ah, and approaching 300 hours.........I had good service out of mine too. It never showed any of the classic signs either until it grenaded.
.

 

[Scrubcadet10]

Did you ever check the top cover bolts?
As far as I know most people never knew the bolts were loose until it kaboomed

 

[bertsmobile1]

The worst non cracked one I had come in was an engine that would not crank.
The owner had changed the starter, solenoid & battery
It would not crank because one bolt had backed out into the flywheel, ground most of the head off then bent far enough to prevent the flywheel rotating .
Oddly enough , no crack, no blown gasket and once the 4 offending bolts were replaced it was back in the hands of the owner .

 

[ChrisBFRPKY]

No body has said there were no problems with the courage singe which became apparent after a considerable amount of time.
If Kohler were the devil you like to paint them they would have said "Stiff Cheese, out of warranty go suck eggs " but no they investigated the problem then made good on just about every engine that failed .
Every mower that has come in with loose bolts was well out of warranty and most would have been lucky to have had the oil changed at all since new .
In my customers case I could have sent the engines in to an authorised Kohler dealer along with my detailed warranty claim form and they would have eventually supplied the dealer with a new short block.
However the dealer confirmed that the whole shooting match would take around 3 months if Kohler actually had any short blocks in stock and up to 2 more if they were waiting on supply from the USA.
The customer then had the choice $ 300 and back on Friday or $ 65 and back at the end of the season ( price of service parts )
If you go to the government recall notice site you will see the ONLY time there is a full product recall is when using the mower is likely to cause serious injury or death and most of these are for fire risk .

Kohler did issue a service alert and your dealer should have contacted you if you are a home service type of person and if you took the mower in for a service then the loctite would have been applied.
The local Husqvarna shop sent out a service alert to all of their customers who had registered their mowers or left contact details so the dealler could follow up .
However the bulk of the customers do not ever register their product and it is blindingly obvious you did not do it either and got caught out .
If you had bought your service parts from the mower shop then you should have been alerted but I will hazard another guess that Joe Broke buys all his parts of Amazon .

AFAIK , Kohler handled the whole shooting match with a very high level of honesty & integrity .
When the Courage went into production Kohler installed a brand new casting machine with a smaller mold carousel imported from Germany. From memory it was a 19 or 23 mold unit.
It was big news in the Americam Foundrymens Journal, Casting Today & Foundry Planet , all of which I subscribe to .
Again I am hazarding a guess here , but it is one that is based on foundry problem solving , that one of the molds had a problem so you end up with 1 in 20 finished engines with a potential problem and this is around the number I see in practice . This could of course just be a coincidence .

As for courts finding patient infringements, I am yet to find a judge who did a Law-Engineering double degree .
Tribunals formed from suitably qualified professionals make sound decisions based on engineering.
Courts make rulings based of the quality of the arguement and that is more to do with the presentation than the facts
Counter weights running on eccentric cams have been around since the recriprocating steam engine so there is nothing new about the idea or application of the idea that has not been done 1000 times before .
Convincing a judge is not a big deal. convnincing a pannel of suitably qualified engineers is another things all together.
Considering that the engines are the same capacities , pistons are similar weights and running speeds are the same it should be no surprise to an intellegent person that the two counterweight balance system end up being very similar.

As for synthetics being superiour they are not .
They are DIFFERENT and different is not superiour .
120 octane race fuel is superiour to the pump gas you put in your mower , but do that and it will auto destruct in a very short time.
Oil flow is a very complicated thing and oil pressure is proportional to the cross sectional area of the flow surfaces and the resistance of the oil to passing through it.
The resistance to flow is also controlled by the turbulance created by the surface roughness , so journals designed for synthetic oils are ground smoother and to a closer tollerance .
Synthetics flow at a much lower pressure than standard oils because the size & shape of the oil molecules is far more more consistant and in most cases smaller .
Thus when pushed through a slipper type of bearing designed for standard oil most synthetics flow faster at a reduced oil pressure which is exactly what they were designed to do .
However the oil passage on a mower engine designed for standard oils is too big so the pressure drops and the oil film breaks down .
If the mower engine was run all day long every day then it becomes apparent very quickly. but most only run a few hours a week for around 1/2 the year so this takes a long time to rear it's ugly head .

There is nothing wrong with using a synthetic oil, in an engine that is designed for synthetic oil .
Putting it in an engine designed for standard oil is a waste of money at best and detrimental to the engine at worst.
When synthetics hit the market the advertisers had to convince Joe Ignorant that there was value in filling their sump with some thing that was 10 times more expensive so they devised all sorts of stunts in order to sell the product.
Most of these bore no resmenellance to actual service conditions
Down here we got a whole swathe of laboratory test videos of 3 ball & cup testers showing just how much more pressure the synthetics took before they failed.
However these are LAB tests designed to do nothing more than assure quality and to compare changes to a blend or process.
Find some where in your engine where you force 3 ball bearings into a rotating plate till it jambs .

I'm still going to disagree on your stance about synthetic oil. Especially in small engines. I began using synthetic in the 1970's to combat a specific engine failure area of the 5hp L head Briggs engines and it worked like a charm. Those engines were in no way "designed" for synthetic oil. In fact they specifically required sae 30w non detergent oil. You see back in the days of kart racing before Briggs made a ready available IC engine that came with a roller bearing on each end of the crankshaft, the 5hp Briggs engine was prone to lubrication failure on the flywheel side of the block. The crank bore could not get enough oil at high rpm and the shaft would seize in the block, welding aluminum to the crankshaft journal and effectively locking the engine tight. I tried many different approaches to correct this problem from machining and drilling specific areas of the block to actually machining grooves into the main journal of the crankshaft so it would act as a mechanical pump pushing oil toward the seal by using the rotation of the crankshaft. The most successful approach ended up machining the spiral groove into the block main. But for extended high rpm sessions of my open class engines there was still the occasional failure.
Then came my buddy Doug. Doug worked at the local airport performing annual maintenance on small aircraft. One day while I was picking up a few cans of AV gas Doug was in the middle of rebuilding an engine. I'm not certain but I think it was a lycoming. Anyway, Doug complained that the bearings were in poor condition and the ones furthest away from the oil pump were "galded" likely due to the owner performing his own oil changes and not using "aviation oil". He said "Aviation oil would have prevented this damage" I immediately purchased a couple of quarts and went home to experiment. Doug was right, problem solved. The synthetic "Aviation" oil prevented the Briggs crankshafts from melting their way into the flywheel side of the block. I would later put it to the test by using a non modified block in an open class engine build and it worked well with no failure at the flywheel side of the block.

Another benefit. Later I switched the fuel in my kart engines from AV gas over to methanol. It was great and others soon followed. However they were experiencing something I wasn't. Many of their engines were failing due to improper lubrication. You see methanol has a tendency to get past the rings of a small engine and work its way into the engine oil. Their standard oils were being broken down by the methanol, after all it's a great solvent, and their engines were failing as a result. It became a common practice for those guys to drain the oil and refill with fresh stuff approx every 15 to 20 laps or suffer the consequences of a failed engine. Still during long race sessions many of the other guys engines were failing. Mine weren't. I even reused my oil. It was expensive and when drained I noticed it looked good just smelled like it had a lot of methanol in it. I would allow the oil to sit in an open container for a few days and when the methanol evaporated from the oil, I strained it thru a filter and reused it several times over.

So synthetic oil is superior to conventional motor oil in every way shape and form. Small engines benefit from the use of synthetic oil.

 

[ChrisBFRPKY]

And just a side note
No Cubs down here fitted with defective Kohlers that I have ever heard of , just Husqvarna's and in that case the mowers came with either a Kohler ( YTH 4219K ) or a Briggs .
And I too have a Kohler powered mower.
It came from a customer who bought it from a cricket club and when he picked it up it was bone dry & had never been serviced .
There was excessive wear in the engine & both spindle housing wre broken but it cleaned up ok , got a new ACR fitted & he mowed commercially with it for 3 years till he upgraded to a Greenfields with a smaller deck .
I got it as payment for servicing it and currently it is a loaner kept for older customers who don't have the leg strength to work the manual drive on the Cox or Greenfields that I usually loan out.
So yes I have skin in the courage game as well .

As a service tech, I could list common faults with just about every engine that comes through the workshop .
The most warranty claims I have put through are against Kawasaki for rocker housing failures where the support has come loose and taken the locating pip with it.
The last one I serviced I noticed the pip is now longer .

What you fail to appreciate is a vertical shaft engine is the absolute rock bottom engine.
They are all built down to a price which is why manufactureres like Hond who value their name & reputation highly have stopped making them .
This is primarily because the buying public is too stupid to appreciate quality engineering and too cheap to pay for it .
If all the market will pay for is trash then that is what the factories will make .

In the US lots of Cub Cadets were fitted with the Courage engine. We have an online trading site here to buy and sell locally called "craigslist" and on it you can find many examples of those cub cadets for sale with blown engines. Just about any city in the US. Heck even here on this forum there's an engine swap section I noticed that has at least one individual swapping out a failed Courage on a Cub. Some Craftsman mowers also had that engine and I'm sure others as well as most of the lawn tractors in the US are built by either MTD or AYP divisions. There's not a lot of diversity with many models only differing slightly in sheet metal and paint color.

It actually makes sense economically for someone to purchase one of those tractors and repower it. Even if they needed to take it to a local shop and have the work performed. A decent grass cutter here in the US is usually in excess of $2K. For the economically challenged one third of that for a mower with a new engine is certainly appealing.

I agree with your assessment on vertical shaft engines. I think they are fine for the specific application of cutting grass though. Yet if I were to build a high performance engine tomorrow it certainly wouldn't be a vertical shaft design.

 

[ChrisBFRPKY]

Did you ever check the top cover bolts?
As far as I know most people never knew the bolts were loose until it kaboomed

I checked mine after my buddy's second engine had the issue with his backing off. Everything was fine on mine. I never had any issues with the bolts loosening. This caused me to agree with his assessment that it was probably just worker error on his. I think he did put some loctite on his bolts when he sorted his out but I never had to as mine were tight and remained that way until destruction. The only bolts loose or missing on mine happened during the destruction phase when the back of the block came off. Again, I had nothing but good service from this engine until it grenaded. It did vibrate some but all single cylinders do to some degree. I didn't think mine too excessive especially when compared to clone engines. I had to add star lock washers to the side cover of my son's mini bike as his clone engine vibrated the cover bolts loose and leaked the oil out. Which is the repair I'd recommend for the Courage top bolts. Star washers actually bite into the metal and I would put more faith in them holding bolts in place than the loctite.

 

[bertsmobile1]

I'm still going to disagree on your stance about synthetic oil. Especially in small engines. I began using synthetic in the 1970's to combat a specific engine failure area of the 5hp L head Briggs engines and it worked like a charm. Those engines were in no way "designed" for synthetic oil. In fact they specifically required sae 30w non detergent oil. You see back in the days of kart racing before Briggs made a ready available IC engine that came with a roller bearing on each end of the crankshaft, the 5hp Briggs engine was prone to lubrication failure on the flywheel side of the block. The crank bore could not get enough oil at high rpm and the shaft would seize in the block, welding aluminum to the crankshaft journal and effectively locking the engine tight. I tried many different approaches to correct this problem from machining and drilling specific areas of the block to actually machining grooves into the main journal of the crankshaft so it would act as a mechanical pump pushing oil toward the seal by using the rotation of the crankshaft. The most successful approach ended up machining the spiral groove into the block main. But for extended high rpm sessions of my open class engines there was still the occasional failure.
Then came my buddy Doug. Doug worked at the local airport performing annual maintenance on small aircraft. One day while I was picking up a few cans of AV gas Doug was in the middle of rebuilding an engine. I'm not certain but I think it was a lycoming. Anyway, Doug complained that the bearings were in poor condition and the ones furthest away from the oil pump were "galded" likely due to the owner performing his own oil changes and not using "aviation oil". He said "Aviation oil would have prevented this damage" I immediately purchased a couple of quarts and went home to experiment. Doug was right, problem solved. The synthetic "Aviation" oil prevented the Briggs crankshafts from melting their way into the flywheel side of the block. I would later put it to the test by using a non modified block in an open class engine build and it worked well with no failure at the flywheel side of the block.

Another benefit. Later I switched the fuel in my kart engines from AV gas over to methanol. It was great and others soon followed. However they were experiencing something I wasn't. Many of their engines were failing due to improper lubrication. You see methanol has a tendency to get past the rings of a small engine and work its way into the engine oil. Their standard oils were being broken down by the methanol, after all it's a great solvent, and their engines were failing as a result. It became a common practice for those guys to drain the oil and refill with fresh stuff approx every 15 to 20 laps or suffer the consequences of a failed engine. Still during long race sessions many of the other guys engines were failing. Mine weren't. I even reused my oil. It was expensive and when drained I noticed it looked good just smelled like it had a lot of methanol in it. I would allow the oil to sit in an open container for a few days and when the methanol evaporated from the oil, I strained it thru a filter and reused it several times over.

So synthetic oil is superior to conventional motor oil in every way shape and form. Small engines benefit from the use of synthetic oil.

I will not argue that if you are substantially modifing the engine then the original oil might not work as it should and the crank can end up becoming an effective slinger preventing the oil entering the passageway it was designed to flow through.
But modifing a low power slow reving engine into a high performance cart engine is a whole different ball game to dumping synthetic into a standard engine and expecting magic to happen.
An yes we have mower racing down here & I have assisted some galoots who want to get 7000 + out of their Briggs engines and have them stay together for the whole season .
Also built stacks of dope powered BSA A7 ( 500cc ) twin enginesback in the 70's / 80's for open class kart racing as well as Gold Star powered midgets and strait Goldie short circuit racers.
'All running dope and lubed with castor oil because of the afore mentioned chemical incompatibality between dope & mineral oil .
Naturally this stopped when dope was banned but now I do an occasional engine for historic / period racing where dope is allowed.
But again that does not make synthetic universally better, it makes it different .

What I have seen is a lot of bog standard mower engines with top bush seizures because the owner switched to synthetics, ignored the max slope recommendations and cooked their engines .
And this is even worse if they decide to mow at less than full revs because hey want to go slow .
They don't get the fact that the synthetic drains out of the top well faster so where as on 30 they could mow right along their entire sloped yard in one hit without problems , the synthetic caused seizures unles they zig-zag a bit.
I have also seen quite a few where the engine ran dry because the synthetic escaped past the lower seal ( which were old and should have been replaced ) and the owner was oblivious to this because the synthetics do not burn and stink any near as much as standard oil does.
Ditto for engines with old worn bores that used to smoke a bit on SAE 30 but magically stopped blowing smoke out the exhaust when they switched to synthetic , till the engine ran out of oil & stopped all together.

The other problem with synthetics is not the oil itself but the users who seriously believe because it costs 5 to 10 times as much it should stay in the engine for 5 to 10 times longer rather than being changed every season.

I am not a luddite and use synthetics where specified, particularly in hydro trannies but to date there are no mowers in my service run that require synthetics .

I also used to assist a couple of racers who drove rally cross , sort of short circuit for cars back in the 70's .
In these we ran ATF/graphite mix in the diff & box and if we were lucky they would last a full season in Minnis & VWs before the gears were worn sharp enough to shave on .
However you do these sorts of things cause we were chasing 80Hp from an old 1200cc 40Hp VW

 

[gainestruk]

I'm still having great service out of my Courage 19hp, its never had synthetic oil in it, always Pennzoil 10W30 and I'm up to 867 hrs as of last mow,.
Before first mow each year I take fan cover off and check.bolt torque and clean fins, I change oil each 50 hrs and keep air pre cleaner clean washing and oiling it after every 2nd mow and change filter and pre cleaner each year.
I average 45-60 hrs a year depending on how much rain we get her in Oklahoma.