Weekend Margin

Also pull the plug lead before you put your hands anywhere near the blade, regardless of the smoke question.

Drawing on it feels wrong but I can see why that helps.

High bust rather than full bust. Nobody in any of the pattern instructions said that out loud.

When you do cut, cut a neat square and keep the piece. Screwing it back onto a couple of battens is far easier than patching a ragged hole.

The copper wire detail is exactly the kind of thing I would have got wrong with a drill bit. Thank you.

Run it dry or treat it. Noted for October.

If you are selling these, a rustic top is a selling point. If they are for you, nobody is looking.

Load tells you which circuit it is running on. It is the most useful free test on any small engine.

Almost always, and specifically the idle circuit rather than the main jet. Under load the engine draws through the main jet and everything is fine, which is exactly what you are seeing. At no load it is running on the pilot circuit, and that passage is far smaller and blocks far more easily.

Pull the bowl, remove the pilot jet if yours is removable, and clean it and the small passages around the throttle plate. On many of these the pilot is pressed in and you clean it in place with cleaner and air.

The other candidate is the governor. If cleaning does not settle it, check the linkage for slop and the spring for being stretched or hooked in the wrong hole - a worn linkage hunts because the governor overshoots both ways. But do the carburettor first, given the winter sit.

I reset a 2000 card backlog once because a forum post told me to. I lost every interval I had built over eight months and spent the next three re-learning cards I already knew. It felt great for one evening and bad for a season.

Also check whether the door has been repainted four times. Layers add up and behave exactly like swelling.

Then it is not the exhaust. Clean the screen anyway while it is apart and go and look at that flywheel key.

Half the diagnosis on these is remembering what you did to it last year.

Check the exhaust port and the spark arrestor screen too. A carbon blocked muffler will stop a two stroke firing, and on a six year old trimmer that has run rich it is common.

Whichever you choose, stick with it for six months. Changing wax means all your wick testing starts again from zero.

This is what I would do, but only because I enjoy it. If the evening is precious, buy the carb.