Is the Kohler Courage really that bad?

[Scrubcadet10]

What do you guys think about Slick 50? Best oil on the market. Extra 40hp with zero friction. Now my engines won't shut off they are so slick. Don't even have to gas them up.

slomo

 

[Hammermechanicman]

Not quite as good as the "what's the best 2 stroke oil" thread on the OPE forum.
???

 

[Hammermechanicman]

I think we should get Taryl to make some Taryl apparel that says: Do you have the courage to run a courage engine??

 

[Scrubcadet10]

I have the courage
All it takes a little responsibility on the owners end. Check them bolts, or remove them and loctite them.

 

[Rivets]

Com’on now, who’s trying to change the subject? At my age I’ve got a hard time staying on topic. Don’t try to confuse me.

 

[Hammermechanicman]

Not a fan boy of any brand. I see my share of courage engines. Haven't seen backed out bolts in years. What i have seen is leaking valve cover gaskets and blown head gaskets and the usual kohler carb and ignition problems.

 

[Scrubcadet10]

Com’on now, who’s trying to change the subject? At my age I’ve got a hard time staying on topic. Don’t try to confuse me.

I don't know, but i think we were talking about a space shuttle going to the moon...

 

[bertsmobile1]

Are you saying there was not a problem with those engines? Are you saying Kohler did not extend the engine warranty on those engines to 5 years? Are you saying there never was a lawsuit Briggs VS Kohler over a stolen counterbalance system? Are you saying Kohler did not have design problems with their early version of a balance system? Please let me know which of these you dispute and we'll go from there. Like I said it's about the facts. Who you are or who I am has nothing to do with the price of clones in China.

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 .

 

[logert gogert]

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 .

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

 

[bertsmobile1]

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 .