OutdoorKing Repair Forum Forums Repairs and Maintenance Questions on Engines Questions On Briggs & Stratton Engines Smokey victa briggs!!

Am curious to know if this one is chinese built or not, mower appeared to not have done much work but smoked like a B***H. On dismantling, there was a little ring gap ;p
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Engine no and code 121702 0178-01 90041725.

The bore actually has a lot of wear as well. The ridge was to large to allow the rings past it without a fair whack with the hammer.

Cant tell from there, if its got vertical ridges on the back of the block, it is at minimum chinese cast.

EDIT, just saw your date code, 1990, I'd say after 23 years the rings are well spent

Good point, I still don't think of 1990 being nearly a quarter of a century, just seems like yesterdays.

There is a reason that commercial engines have cast iron cylinder liners. With good treatment (mainly, regular oil changes and ensuring the air filter is working at all times) the light home-duty aluminium bore engines can do a reasonable job, but whereas with an iron bore you can expect to replace the rings several times before the bore gives out, that is not really true of an aluminium bore. By the time the rings are worn out, the bore will be fairly worn. It could be re-used in most cases without boring it oversized, but it could not be expected to last all that long with just a set of new rings in the old bore.

Concerning Chinese manufacture, Briggs' Chongqing plant was not opened until 2003, so your engine was obviously not made there. With regard to where it was actually made, according to the Code, your engine was built in Plant 25. That one was gone and forgotten by 2010 - I can't even tell you where it was, but it was an American plant.

There are far more Briggs engine plants that have been closed, than there are currently operating. All side valve engine production has been moved to Chongqing, China by now, though the large engines (for ride-ons) only moved last year. Briggs now only builds OHV and DOV engines in the US. They have been forced by competitive pressures to only make high-value products there, and produce the cheap engines in countries with lower cost structures. Honda has made similar changes: they now make some of their popular engines in China and Thailand. In particular, as far as I can tell, Honda's GXV160 engine has been made only in China for a number of years now.

Remember, there are many good-quality products made in China. There can be some teething troubles in first making a complex product in a country which has limited experience in that kind of manufacturing, but leading global manufacturers usually have the management skills to get this sorted out within a reasonable period. Outdoorking has threads reporting problems in early Briggs engines from Chongqing, but these difficulties seem to have tapered off or stopped altogether. Similarly, there does not seem to be much adverse comment on the manufacturing quality of Honda's GXV160 engines, which are used in a large proportion of Australian contractors' mowers.