I once had a riding mower that developed a thirst for oil. I don’t mean just a little smoke here and there. I mean massive clouds of smoke until it warmed up and then it would flash over and burn the oil as flames out the exhaust. It got to the point where it was going through about a quart every 10 minutes. Then there was the fact that I would turn the engine off and it would still be running on the oil like a runaway diesel.
I had several people offer up their reasons why this was happening and the one that made the most sense to me was blown head gaskets. This would offer a nice supply of oil and extra air from the crankcase to make it run extra lean and hot to where it could do this. Others kept suggesting the timing was too far advanced but the flywheel key seemed fine and replacing it made no difference. Anyone have other ideas?
I have videos that I will have to dig up from this as filming at night was quite spectacular.
Anyone ever seen a gasoline engine runaway on oil? If it was hot enough you could mow the yard with the key in the off position. The only way to get it to shut down was to choke it and even that didn’t work some of the time. It would slow down and the flames would transition from blue/white to yellow/orange so wasn’t as hot but would still run like this.
This was a Kohler Courage that had given me fits with other small issues so when it started doing this I really didn’t care to look into fixing it.