Yet Another Evening Of Small Engine Repair

For fifteen weeks, Monday night has became small engine repair night. I feel like I have learned a lot but knowledge is sometimes difficult to quantify. When it comes to fixing a small engine, one thing I have learned is that knowledge will only take you so far. Experience has a lot to do with it as well. The teacher has a _lot_ of experience. He certainly knows this stuff.

Tonight's challenge was repairing my pressure washer. The thing has never run well, at least until now.

This evening I removed the carb and cleaned it - basically the carb needed the varnish removed from the bowl and the main jet cleaned out. After that I replaced the spark plug and then adjusted the idle. Vrooom! Better than new.

Previously the engine would 'hunt' while running and it would only run with the choke on and the throttle wide open. The hunting was caused by the clogged jet. Running it wide open with the throttle mostly closed (aka running rich) caused the plug to build up a lot of black sooty carbon.

During the carb cleaning, I determined the way to keep this particular engine running well will be to remove the carb bowl after each us and drain it completely. This would certainly be overkill for some engines but not this one. A pain for sure, but it only takes a couple of minutes and it will keep the carb from needing to be cleaned again.

What can I learn about next?