Hi All, Just joined here, I recently bought an old-school Victa 18, which came with the pullstarter and the correct 3 clip air filter cover.It wasn't going when I bought it and so I got it pretty cheap, but only started work on it today.I pulled it over a few times after putting some fresh fuel in it and tickling the carb, but no sign of a fire, so I started pulling it apart to get to the coil and points.
The four screws came out of the pullstarter ok and looked genuine, except 2 had lost their star washers, so didn't tighten down quite enough, which had the starter slopping around a bit, the pull starter cup, was only hand tight, so I screwed that off, and found the thread badly stripped, more on that later. I took the three bolts out of the cowling , 2 genuine 1 bodgy and one of the genuine nuts had stripped as well. The rotor was so loose, I took it off with my hands, not sure if it should be as tight as a later model mower, but for now it made disassembly easy.I found the points looked fairly good and upon rotation opened to about 25 thou, so looked ok, the coil seemed a bit loose which I didn't like, as it would magnet pull everytime the rotor came around, like that closing the air gap.
I found the cowling nuts on the inside of the cowling mount disc had another nut siliconed in on one which worked but they all need new nuts welded in, which I will do. So the main thing I thought was stopping the engine from firing, was the keyway didnt line up all the way down, putting the timing out, so I rotated the misaligned bottom bit with my fingers, tapped the key steel in gently and replaced the rotor, tapping it down gently to seat it. It was here, that the problems I need to address started showing, The thread on the shaft was only sticking out of the rotor about 15-20 ml, and the top couple of threads were fairly bad, it looked like a previous, hamfisted tinkerer, had smashed downwards on the shaft, to get the rotor off, at some time and malled it over. I fixed it up with light flapper discing and got the stripped cup to screw on reasonably firm, but wasn't game to really force it any further.
I replaced the cowling, nipped up the bolts which did up ok, but just enough to try and get the old girl going and replaced the pullstarter, I had made a mental note whilst disassembling everything, to check what spark plug was in the head, it looked new, but when I checked what it was, I found a BP6ES, a long reach spark plug in an old-school, 2 stroke, lawnmower seemed odd to me, and I was hoping it hadn't hit the piston. I replaced it with a new CJ8, turned on the fuel tap, tickled the carby, put the throttle to about half and proceeded to pull it over about six times, with no fire, so tickled it again and it kicked, pulled again and it ran and stopped after 5 secs, the next time it fired and ran rough for 20secs, the next one and it ran roughly at first but got better and as I increased the revs slowly, it got reasonably good and when I backed the throttle right off, it did stop it as well, so far so good.
Now the questions: I tried to restart it again to check how it would respond, after having run for the first time in maybe 20 yrs and the pull rope didn't grip, so I pulled the cowling off again and found the cup was loose and this time, could not be tightened at all, so it is stuffed, I need another one with some thread. Would any one on here have a spare decent one they could sell me? I also think the hamfisted one has cut off about 6 mm of the thread on the shaft, to get the malled over bit gone, so I need to know, how far should the shaft be sticking out of the rotor? I have 12- 15 mm.
My other questions are: How was the exhaust pipe connected to the engine on these ones, Mine has the heat dissipation finned pipe going into the base hole, but only has 1 hole on the flange to bolt it on, even though there appears to be another bolt hole on the other side as well, but no flange protruding there to put another bolt in and the pipe is straight through, so very noisy. I packed it as lightly as I could with some very coarse steel wool, but then couldn't try it because of the pullstart problem.With this pipe with the fins in the way, the only way you could put another bolt into the other manifold hole, would be a phillps head screw, if you had flange to bolt it onto, which there isn't and I don't believe it was broken off either, so it looks like it is a one bolt job to hold on the muffler pipe.
Last question for now: Can you still get the genuine blades for these mowers anywhere? And should there be 2 or 4 blades, on these mowers. So to cap off, I need a cup, an air filter and some blades if some kind soul can help, I am in Ballarat Victoria, so can come to Melb to pick them up.Cheers Hooter.
Last edited by Hooter; 31/05/25 02:43 AM.
