Anyone out there have this engine? Been meaning to ask this for years. The snapper model did not come with an electric start. I must say, the recoil starter on this engine is the most frustrating thing I have ever seen. First, unless you wear gloves trying to start this, you will quickly learn to. Here are the four issues I have had with this engine:
1) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope..... flywheel does not spin very far (high compression perhaps) and the entire mower comes off the ground (wheel on other side comes off the ground). This puts a pretty good jolt to your shoulder and your hands.
2) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope.... flywheel turns and then the system yanks the starter t-handle out of your hand so hard that it actually over time has chipped the corners of the t-handle and once hit the oil dipstick handle so hard it cracked it. This also can inflict some pain on the hands, etc
3) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope and it turns over normally (although not easy), but you are on edge because you think number 1 or 2 above is going to happen.
4) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope and the starter pawls basically pop out of the little slots inside and you have to take the thing apart and fix..... only to experience all of the above again.
5) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope and the actual knot inside the t-handle fails and the rope gets sucked into the recoil. Number 5 happened only when I changed the recoil rope and the knot kept failing (even after a slight melting). The failure was due to the enormous amount of tension on the rope when all of the above are happening.
Has anyone else experienced this? I know the solution would be to add an electric start to it, but I cannot even get Briggs to tell me if one will work (how unreal is that .... they don't even know their stuff even though I recall the model number of the snapper ending in BV and seeing one in the manual as BVE [which I gather means it has electric start].
1) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope..... flywheel does not spin very far (high compression perhaps) and the entire mower comes off the ground (wheel on other side comes off the ground). This puts a pretty good jolt to your shoulder and your hands.
2) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope.... flywheel turns and then the system yanks the starter t-handle out of your hand so hard that it actually over time has chipped the corners of the t-handle and once hit the oil dipstick handle so hard it cracked it. This also can inflict some pain on the hands, etc
3) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope and it turns over normally (although not easy), but you are on edge because you think number 1 or 2 above is going to happen.
4) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope and the starter pawls basically pop out of the little slots inside and you have to take the thing apart and fix..... only to experience all of the above again.
5) you put foot on rear tire and pull starter rope and the actual knot inside the t-handle fails and the rope gets sucked into the recoil. Number 5 happened only when I changed the recoil rope and the knot kept failing (even after a slight melting). The failure was due to the enormous amount of tension on the rope when all of the above are happening.
Has anyone else experienced this? I know the solution would be to add an electric start to it, but I cannot even get Briggs to tell me if one will work (how unreal is that .... they don't even know their stuff even though I recall the model number of the snapper ending in BV and seeing one in the manual as BVE [which I gather means it has electric start].