How to drain oil on B&S mower engine?

[The_Nuke]

Originally Posted By: bubbatime
Originally Posted By: The_Nuke
As such, I just grabbed a bottle of house brand SAE 30 motor oil from a local Wal-Mart.


House brand oil is just fine for a lawn mower, as long as it is detergent oil and not SA non-detergent oil. As I stated earlier, I run a small engine shop and do tons of lawn mower oil changes. I've literally used hundreds of gallons of Supertech or Ace Hardware oil (when it goes on sale for $1.99) when the customer has no oil preference. I also keep Pennzoil, Valvoline, Quaker State, and Mobil 1 in stock for customers that request it.


Originally Posted By: The_Nuke
But I have since seen that there is a whole separate line of engine oils for the 4 cycle small engines, and it is packaged, labeled, and priced differently than the motor oils in the automotive section.

Should I have used one of the oils designated for 4 cycle small engines?


Regular motor oil is 4 cycle oil. That is called marketing, and they charge more for it. The additive package might be slightly different, but I highly doubt your engine will notice the difference. Just the fact that you are giving it regular oil changes is better than what 90% of the small engines out there get.



Yeah, I knew the regular stuff was 4 cycle oil, but yesterday was the first time I'd heard these new small engines were actually 4 cycles. So I was wondering if they required different oil additive packages than normal due to their longer OCIs, operating conditions, etc.

But I'm satisfied now that I'm good to go.

Thanks for the help everyone.

 

[Whimsey]

If you look at the B&S oil bottles for the API rating it's usually rated SM. That's nothing special for air cooled 4 cycle engines. Some other OPE brands are rated SL, might be a bit more beneficial to these engines. But the B&S owners manual seems to recommend API rated oils from SF and higher. Maintaining the oil level and regular oil changes are more important.

Whimsey

 

[slomo]

I've seen dozens of plastic tubes stuck to crankshafts and transmission valve bodies from lazy people trying to skip a step on oil changes. I'll admit it, I've done it myself, once. Pulled the transmission pan off to remove the now shortened plastic hose. That cheap o leaking POS pump went into the trash. Man it was fun being 16 years old.... Don't use a pump. Don't care how many years it's been done.

slomo

 

[supton]

Originally Posted By: slomo
I've seen dozens of plastic tubes stuck to crankshafts and transmission valve bodies from lazy people trying to skip a step on oil changes. I'll admit it, I've done it myself, once. Pulled the transmission pan off to remove the now shortened plastic hose. That cheap o leaking POS pump went into the trash. Man it was fun being 16 years old.... Don't use a pump. Don't care how many years it's been done.

slomo


Are you against using a pump to remove oil from OPE specifically, or against pumps in general?

Sounds like you have seen the usage of low temp tubing used for the job.

 

[RF Overlord]

Originally Posted By: bubbatime
Just the fact that you are giving it regular oil changes is better than what 90% of the small engines out there get.
This statement is the very essence of lawn-mower oil maintenance. AMSOIL 4T in a lawn-mower? How about VatoZone HD-30...plenty good enough.

 

[jhellwig]

I personally don't have any problem removing the drain plug to drain the oil. It gives me a chance to do the other maintenance on the mower while it is draining.

I don't have any push mowers with any self propelled stuff to get in the way though.

 

[bchannell]

Well, I must say, you should use a piece of plastic tubing long enough to not be able to be lost in the crankcase. I am not familiar with the pump you bought, but the one from Walmart, or O'reilly's works like gangbusters and is around $7 IIRC.

Also, the point is that a lot of newer mowers don't have a drain plug, or if they do it's tucked up inside the belt shroud on a self propelled mower, and no one in their right mind wants to take all that off to do an oil change, or get oil in the belt housing causing more problems that you were trying to alleviate.

 

[Gilstein]

Originally Posted By: dernp
Just be careful if you're tipping it on it's side. Sometimes the fuel will come racing out of the gas cap. On my Sears Craftsman mower with a Briggs engine I usually dump the oil when the fuel level is low.


my first start up after the change had a lot of smoke too. Guess tipping it over gets some oil in the "wrong" places and it needed to burn off. No harm and it runs fine, but it was worrying at first.