Hello, I live in a small town outside Ottawa Canada. I've been doing a lot of small engine work lately supporting my brother's equipment. I used to moto-cross 45 years ago and have always had an interest in engines. My brother thought that qualified me to be his unpaid mechanic.
I've been working on a Toro model 20668. It has a Briggs and Stratton engine, 1247023115 01 that was manufactured in 1990. The machine is getting better and better and I have been youtubing and searching forums to self-educate myself.
I think this site will be a great resource for me.
Toro have factory maintenance manuals for all of their equipment on line as free downloads.
Do some downloading & printing, videos do not stay inside your head words you read do, particularly what you read just before bedtime.
I too had a history in motorcycling, in my case BSA ( still do) so thought that mower repair would be a walk in the park 5 years ago when I bought the business, it wasn't.
While I spent way too many hours watching Taryl, Donny Boy, Steve , Joe Pace what really turned me into a small engine mechanic was the JD technical manuals as they are the only ones that explain HOW things should work.
Once that was down pat ( mostly ), working out WHY things you have never seen before , don't work became second nature.
After that I joined every mower, chainsaw, trimmer forum I could join for free, lurked in the background till I got the feel for them, dumped all the waste of time ones where every one says howdy & Godbless but proffers no technical help which left me here + a hand full of single marque forums where a lot of obsolete technical data is archived.
Enjoy your time with us, if you are thinking about doing mowers full time cause you enjoy playing with engines then go for it. Very few things are more rewarding to oneself than working in a field you love.
I bought a Tiny Tach and used it on my 2 stroke outboard and on the 4 stroke lawn mower. I didn't change any settings on the tach and yet I was getting expected rpm's on each machine. A bit of research on this site brought up the concept of "wasted" spark ignition that explained why I could get believable rpms from a 2 stroke motor and a 4 stroke motor without changing any settings.
I'm new here too and I would love to know more about different brands of lawn mower so I could finally buy the right model for me to use. Nice to meet new members like me here!
