Oilgate
 

Ignore the sticker. Change the oil in your machines.
https://youtu.be/f9MD3XDtSnM
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=f9MD3X...ature=youtu.be
Remember, Briggs and Stratton want to sell you a new lawn mower.

Correction. B&S wants you to buy a new engine. Mower probably outlasts the time you live in the house. I think my last one was 20 years old when I moved, I changed the oil twice

I've never had a small engine destruct before, even heavily abused ones.

Even had 1 mower that would seize up and die when it regularly ran out of oil. Just top up the oil, and mow on. The engine never gave up, but the rest of the mower did.

That's exactly what she says in the video. Something to the effect of "these aren't the same as the ones from 20 years ago". Those inblock valve engine were very hard to kill.

My only experience with B&S OHV is my generator, it's super reliable but I take religious care of it. It's an 08 if I remember correctly.

With the entire valvetrain sitting lower, it's easier for oil to reach earlier all the gaps it's supposed to fill.

I spent a bit of time in the lawn and garden industry. Every machine has a design life and all the major components are made to that design life. The company I worked for made hydrostatic transaxles for riders and transaxles for walk-behind mowers.

The John Deere riders you can get at Home Depot and other big box stores had a design life of 250 hours. Deere calculated that to be 10 years. Because their design life was only 250 hours they had us remove the drain plugs from their version of the transaxle because their manual said the transaxle had "lifetime" oil and never needed to be changed and than saved them 25 cents per vehicle. They were correct - the transaxle would go 250 hours without changing the oil even though the best thing you can do for a hydrostat is regular oil changes. The same transaxle was sold to other manufacturers with a 2000 hour life with regular oil and filter changes.

So you could extend the life of the transaxle but that wouldn't really do you a lot of good because the entire machine was made to last 250 hours. We tried to reuse tractors for our testing but other bearings and bushing, and other parts started failing. Even the stamped steel frames would start cracking at 400 - 500 hours even just driving them on a concrete test track. We basically found it wasn't worth trying to reuse them - they were truly disposable lawn tractors.

I'll have to see if my dad's Craftsman hydrostatic drive oil can be changed. I suppose one could drill and tap to add their own plug.

My dad is a fixer, so if the frame started cracking, he'd get the welder out.

You could do that but you would want to pull the lower case before doing it. Aluminum chips would do a number of the center case surface of a hydrostat. Change the oil filter while you have it apart.

For the John Deere you had to pull the transmission and flip it upside down to change the oil. (Of course you could then add drain holes / plugs)

Rule of thumb was to change the oil at 50 hours and then every 200 after that.

The crazy thing to me is that we buy these fairly expensive machines that get way less than 1% utilization. I estimate the mower gets 35 hours of use per year.

I'd rather a community share such resources so we can own a mower, tiller, edger, and helicopter.

High expense, low utilization things are a waste of money. The share economy hasn't gone far enough; but unfortunately that also requires a high trust society, which we're unwilling to create. We've accepted that folks impose upon us, without consequence.