What should I replace my Kohler Courage 25 twin with????

[firefighter*17]

If the block is in good shape, I would rebuild it.
Don’t take the word of the dealer at face value. Have the mechanic show you exactly what is broken.

Thanks for the reply and input! I took it to a small engine repair shop this week and diagnosis is the same as dealer. He showed me all the damaged parts. The small engine shop said the Kohler's Courage VTwin engines were junk, had countless issues and a bad reputation. He said Kohler replaced it with the 7000 series... a better engine. I think I'd be better off finding a 7000 series or comparable before rebuilding a poorly designed engine.

 

[MParr]

Thanks for the reply and input! I took it to a small engine repair shop this week and diagnosis is the same as dealer. He showed me all the damaged parts. The small engine shop said the Kohler's Courage VTwin engines were junk, had countless issues and a bad reputation. He said Kohler replaced it with the 7000 series... a better engine. I think I'd be better off finding a 7000 series or comparable before rebuilding a poorly designed engine.

You are on the right track.

 

[Tiger Small Engine]

You are on the right track.

The Kohler Courage single cylinder is even worse than the twin. Good you got a second opinion. To exchange the engine and make sure it is compatible the following things are important:
1) bolt pattern measurements
2) engine crankshaft width and length
3) how the muffler fits
4) the wiring, plugs right up vs hard wiring
5) the physical size of engine dimensions
So it is not as easy as throwing an engine in there. Takes research and planning.

 

[slomo]

I was out mowing and it started running rough then quit. It wouldn't start back up I checked all the usual and obvious things but it wouldn't restart. Checked oil it was good... I'm very meticulous about oil changes and maintaining the mower so not sure exactly what happened. Took it to my local dealership and they said it had two scorched pistons, valve was stuck on one cylinder and push rod and head damage to the other cylinder. So here I am looking for solutions that won't come back to bite me.

Sounds like an over heated engine.

 

[Bertrrr]

Yep, that's what I found when I tore into one.

 

[firefighter*17]

Sounds like an over heated engine.

Yep, always cleaned after each use and always stored in my climate controlled shop. Kohler's Courage was just a poorly designed engine. Thanks for the input!

 

[Tiger Small Engine]

Yep, always cleaned after each use and always stored in my climate controlled shop. Kohler's Courage was just a poorly designed engine. Thanks for the input!

Unless you remove the engine shroud, and tins around the cylinders, there is no effective way to remove oil, dirt, grass, etc. from the engine cooling fins and engine case. Book says you are supposed to check under engine shroud once a year. Most rarely if ever get checked. I clean a lot of dirty engines once the shroud is removed.

 

[slomo]

Unless you remove the engine shroud, and tins around the cylinders, there is no effective way to remove oil, dirt, grass, etc. from the engine cooling fins and engine case. Book says you are supposed to check under engine shroud once a year. Most rarely if ever get checked. I clean a lot of dirty engines once the shroud is removed.

That was what I was getting at. Bet the shroud screw heads are like new.

 

[VegetiveSteam]

Thanks for the reply and input! I took it to a small engine repair shop this week and diagnosis is the same as dealer. He showed me all the damaged parts. The small engine shop said the Kohler's Courage VTwin engines were junk, had countless issues and a bad reputation. He said Kohler replaced it with the 7000 series... a better engine. I think I'd be better off finding a 7000 series or comparable before rebuilding a poorly designed engine.

I would agree. At this point trying to rebuild this engine, if it indeed has failed as described, would not be the way to go. Your engine failed so my opinion really doesn’t help your issue, but I would have to strongly disagree with your mechanic’s assessment of the Kohler Courage Twin cylinder engine.

The problem for the Courage Twin Cylinder engine is it shared its name with the Courage Single cylinder engine which was without a doubt not Kohler’s best work. But’s it also why Kohler took care of failed Courage Single Cylinder engines far outside of their warranty period. Many years after in fact.

Like I said, yours failed so this really won’t mean much to you, but the Courage Twin Cylinder engine was a good engine. It wasn’t without a few nuisance issues when it first came out, but it was not known for major failures.

I’ll admit I am somewhat biased as I represented Kohler for 27 years, but I also have nothing to gain from defending them. Like I mentioned before, the Courage Single Cylinder engine gave Courage a bad name and too many simply hear the word Courage and regardless of whether it’s a single or a twin cylinder it gets tagged as junk and nothing could be further from the truth for the twin.

Whether it's a Kohler, Briggs, Kawasaki or Honda, if an engine runs from brand new for an hour without issue, and then has a catastrophic failure at 300 hours it is rarely the fault of the engine.

I will step down from my soapbox now.

 

[bertsmobile1]

As some one with an engineering back ground I have a lot of admiration for the Courage singles, a brilliant design that suffered badly from a modification to make it cheaper but mainly from non mantiance amplified by bigotry and ignorance
So yes the ACR's can fail, as do the ones on the Inteks but at a much lower rate and after a while Kohler fixed that
OTOH replacing a failed cam is a 45 minute job done with the mower in the engine
Replacing the cam on an Intek is a 4 hour job if you are lucky, engine out of mower
If the blower housing came off every season to clean the fins then the owners of the few that loosen to closure plate bolts should have seen this & tightened them
However I have had more than one come in "making a funny noise " or "cranks slow " where the heads of 2 or 3 bolts had been completely ground off by the flywheel
And nearly all of these needed nothing more than a new bolt or 2 and a drop of loctite to be as good as new .
I have welded 3 engines where they did crack but these were all high high hour machines.
When the crack manifested itself Husqvarna dumped thousands of mowers they pulled off the US market down here in OZ heavily discounted
I have 22 courages that are sequential & all have the same engine serial so they were all from the same batch
Only 1 of these developed the crack.
The final "flaw" is Kohler engineers failed to appreciate just how lazy, cheap & stupid Americans are
Thus You tube is chockers with videos on how to fix the leaky rocker cover gasket .
How do you fix it ?
Easy
Shove your power driver up some where that will give you the least nutritional benefit and perhaps the most pleasure.
Do the nuts up with your fingers and only to the correct torque.
A new gasket every time and it will not leak
Done up with a power driver the nut gets over tightened which cuts the gasket so it leaks and double this if you reuse an old chopped up one with a sliver of silicon over the top .
The said same "highly flawed total junk" engine is made in the tens of thousands by Kohler China and is the backbone of the EU & Asia where owners are obviously more intelligent than the average US idiot .
BEcaus of the dumping of models in OZ by Husqvarna I have far more Kohler engines in my service run than any other brand yet my biggest engine failure by far is head gaskets in Inteks which is generally around the 5 to 10 mark every season
The second biggest engine failure is broken ACR's on inteks which is running at 2 to 3 a season