Forty four years ago, it was on my way home from school that I found myself picking through someones rubbish. I was not actually picking through it because I was only interested in the one thing that had caught my eye, an engine, a Briggs and Stratton three horsepower engine, a Briggs and Stratton for free awesome! I couldn't believe my good fortune, I had seen and read about them through a subscription of popular mechanics purchased during a magazine drive at school that regularly featured build it yourself go cart and mini bike plans and all kinds of cool mechanical stuff. They use to sell pretty much the whole gocart or mini bike less the engine and now I had an engine, I had no idea if it ran or not but thinking I could fix it if it didn't was my only train of thought period. ( it could have had a hole in the piston for all I knew, hell did I even know what a piston was at twelve?)
Turns out it was attached to a lawn mower and had a vertical shaft direct to the blade so as to be not readily adaptable to either a go cart or mini bike but it was free and it was coming with me. So with school books in one hand I pushed that lawnmower home with the other stopping every now and then to check out my find, my gold in the saying "one man, s junk is another man's gold" a springboard( little did I know)to the very basics of my grounds equipment maintenance knowledge. I had to work in the greenhouses after school so my much more exciting thing to do would have to wait and don't you go thinking that was easily accomplished because all I could think was hearing the Briggs and Stratton run, my Briggs and Stratton!The slowest two hours to ever pass passed and like a fly on cow Patti I was on it trying to find what made this thing tick.
The first thing I did was pull the start cord at least thirty times without as much as a puff of smoke to spur me on but not one easily put off I kept at it. Someone yelled over from the greenhouse that I should check for spark and let me tell you how you never want to check for spark (as in hold the spark plug wire while you pull the cord because if there is spark you are definitely going to know it)Yow it had spark alright! nearly knocked me over. Just then another voice from the greenhouse asked is there any gas in it and upon inspection I noticed there was a small amount but it smelled a little funny( I did know the smell gasoline, as kid I loved it) and turns out it had started to turn to what they called varnish so I would have to locate some good gas.
I needed gas and not seeing any cans around I decided on a covert action, I would have to disobey my dads instruction on what not to do that I had seen him doing with a hose sticking into the gas tank of his dump truck, I would have to siphon gas and so noted was the reason for not trying that, a mouth full of regular and an over flowing coffee can later. ( an art that would be perfected in future attempts)With new gas on the scene my confidence was renewed and so forward we went Briggs and Stratton and me but several pulls on the cord later and a tiring pair of arms nothing, absolutely nothing. Thats when I noticed the little choke slide on the end of the intake to the carburetor and that it was stuck when I tried to pull it out but after a few tries it pulled out. Finally after pulling that cord what seems like a hundred times I noticed a puff of smoke, a puff of smoke yes!
To make this already long story a wee bit shorter about my foray into grounds equipment maintenance I'll tell you what I did to make that Briggs and Stratton sing like it's supposed to. Number one was clean the carburetor and gas tank of all the varnished gas along with the air filter that sits on top of the carburetor. Number two was to pull the spark plug out and clean the gap which had become almost nonexistent because of lead deposits. I checked the oil and it was there, it was black and that's all I needed to know at the age of twelve.
There were other factors I didn't know at the time that I would learn as I went along such as points, condenser, magnetic fields on flywheels, coils and how they all tie together to give you spark. To get the clean gas up into the carburetor I pulled the choke out, pulled the cord four or five times and eureka! It was my very first feeling of actually accomplishing something and believe you me I was inspired, although the phrase grounds equipment maintenance couldn't have been farther from my mind the seeds were planted with that Briggs and Stratton.
