OutdoorKing Repair Forum Forums Finding and Swapping Idle Chatter Nice blow out on a Victa V40

Aluminium alloy has a very low fatigue life.
Thus even if the engine was used exactly according to the manual and service better than by the book there is a finite number of timed the rod can go back & forth till it goes bang and that is regardless of what it is fitted to.
Vertical shaft mowers are built to a cost, the cheaper the better, because they buying public is mechanically ignorant, economically ignorant and cheap.

Add to that modern design & testing tools then you can engineer engines that all will fail between 500 & 550 hours.
That is about 10 years.
The Ford mentality is very strong ( made just good enough to outlast warranty ) and Ryobi has become the master of this.
Jo public buys a tool and it works reliably and well for 5 to 10 years then goes bang and you will happily go back to the store & buy another one.
If you want to know the mechanism of failure then you will need to post some better photos with clearer focus ( phone cameras are not good enough ) and close up on all of the fracture surfaces.

As for all you zoom heads, it died because 2 stroke oils get a lot better and in particular became self dispersing.
Profit margins at service stations has not changed in real terms for decades.
When real petrol was 3 shillings a gallon we were making a 6 p profit on it. (about 15%)
Now it is $ 5 / gallon and we are making 30� gross profit (about 5 %)

The greedy selfish buying public decided that saving lolly bar each week on their fuel bill was better value than having their vehicle properly looked after and providing entry level employment to some one else's children.

Rovert, I must be older than you, I was pumping gas at 2 & sixpence a gallon. As for the rest of your response, don't you understand that is all covered by the word "progress" or in the words of one of our infamous leaders "moving forward"

naw, fuel was cheaper in Mexico.

And once upon a time it was cheaper to live in Mexico, but not anymore, they are now predicting 10 million people in Melb in less than 25 years

norm it not progress our industry all sold out by forward thinking polition free trade no turner stanly sidchome acl repco gone victa going this not progress well all shafted. people buying cheap imported junk insteat. masters selling mower $150
rubbish stupid people buy den throw away 3 months later. it have no blade disc just 16 inch bar blade motor have no torque is junk.
old lady at servo cant check oil tyres ect big business don't care they make more profit
10 million people in melb only good for big business building apartments and units. this not progress crowded roades grid locked no parking mower shops all closing now cheap junk not worth fix
say masters mower $150 mower stop
need fix new pull coard and sevice oil blade spark plug filter quote $120 not worth fix throw away
the writing on the wall what happerning here our standard living going down people no readin this look holden ford no jops
our children wonnt enjoy life we had sorry not progress we going backwards

Freebird, our politicians are paid very good money to steer our country in the right direction and to ensure that there is employment for everybody, are you saying this is not happening?

norm most poly is criminal turnbul hide mony offshore to not pay tax. the selling as out to china and other place with free trade soom we make not one thing
how can I by from china didgtle radio for $9.99 free post ebay yet for me I cant post it from frankston to dandyong for $9.99 . some thing wrong here Australia post give china cheaper rate than me they other side world our government joke
norm you try pull my leg again you know they poly no good
I like to flog them cat 9 tails they traitors

Trying not to be too political but both sides have effectivly destroyed the country by sticking their bibs in without any thought of the consequences.
One side will support anything that will replace unionised workers for no other reason that to starve the other side of it's funds base.
So if that means 2,000,000 out of work due to the closure of the auto industry well that is great news.

The other side actively prevents industry modernising and kept industry running at unprofitable industrial revolution manning levels.
Tomogo Aluminium is the perfect example, forbidden to make anything that was profitable and also to to employ 400 more workers than needed then bought off with free electricity.
Thus management refuses to spend money on modernising with high productivity machinery.

Both of them like sucking in money from overseas because that makes for a "beautiful set of numbers" to quote from Costello, today ,however in the long term the overseas money takes back all it spent 100 fold.
The idiot simple way to look at it is buying an investment property ( which they all have by the bucket load ) .
Do you do it to improve the life of the tenants ? street ? suburb? or do you do it to suck as much as you can for your investment then flog it off at a profit whenever you need some quick cash.

Neither of them will support any Australian technology till it has been sold to a foreign country so no one locally makes a cent except the original inventor if they have not been bankrupted first or in may cases killed themselves because they ended up destroying the lives of all who supported them.
Memtech is the perfect example, the inventors travelled the country trying to sell their 21st century sewerage treatment plants but not 1 single federal governement would commit to install one. They went to every state , every local council that had a sewerage plant till eventually they were bankrupt and sold the technology to a German company and now we have 76 of them working and another 200 to be built, by an Amercian company who pays royalties back to the Germans so no Aussies get any benefit other than cleaner water.

Merv robbed Victa to build the Air Cruiser & Tourer and modified them to meet defence department requirements .
How many did we buy ?
92, but only after Merv was broke and sold the project off to Hamilton Hangers in NZ at a loss who by the way also jacked up the price.

Against advice the Howard government plonked the new airport at Badggerys Creek where it will be a disaster in place of Goulburn where it should have gone for no other reason than to prop up the escallation of Sydney real estate prices which having peaked after the destructive "housing grants" was starting to decline and too many over leveraged landlords ( liberal party donators ? ) might have needed to sell off a couple of properties at insuficient profits to support their lifestyle.
So in place of a new airport at Goulburn which would have made the Sydney -Goulburn-Canberra light rail viable and allowed Goulburn to take overflow from Canberra Airport, it is being built in the Sydney basin where there is already insufficient infrastructure to support the current population let alone the 250,000 extra houses slated for the west, and it will be closed due to fog about 20 days a year.

Then they make a big song and danace about sham "decentralisation" by moving a couple of dozen public servants from Sydney CBD to Parramatta CBD.