2003 X585 Burning Oil Rapidly

summers5 said:

Sounds like it wasn't maintained very good but it could have a ton of hours. It sounds like rings too me.

Click to expand...

Thanks for the response. This tractor was used and abused before I got it, certainly has no less than a couple thousand hours. Anyone ever replaced rings on that Kawasaki motor before? Trying to decide if it's a project I want to take on considering the tractor age and hours.

I rebuilt my GX345's Kawasaki FD611v engine this past spring which I would suspect would be similar in design and cost. Like your tractor, mine was neglected by the PO and burned a similar amount of oil - I purchased it knowing that it needed serious work. I believe the root cause in my case was cracked elbow between the air filter and the carb that allowed dust into the engine a as it only had a little over 500 hours on it when I rebuilt it.

The rebuild is straightforward but parts are expensive. I bored it oversize and put new pistons rings and had the heads rebuilt. I probably put $1200 into it between parts and machine work. The cam was shot which added $200 in unplanned costs with tappets. I did replace a few things "while I was there" such as the radiator hoses, water pump, coils and rebuilt the carb which added around $250 to the job. I wanted to minimize any future downtime/repairs and didn't cut any corners.

I'm sure you could do a rebuild for quite bit less but if were me I would assume the cost of going with oversize pistons given the hours and amount of oil that it is burning.

If I were to do it again, I would look seriously at repower options. The tractor runs like new but I still have a 15 year old radiator, starter motor, carb, igniter, etc.

Chris, I wouldn't do a leak down test or ANY other test(s) ! Oil consumption has pretty much 2 causes: Bad rings and/or bad valves (primarily stems/guides.

You're going to have to open it up, go inside, get precision measurements, and find out what's bad. Once you KNOW what's bad, you can make an educated decision on rebuild or re-power. Bob

Same thing happened to me with an Intek 20 HP B&S with 575 hours on it. The oil would be 1/2 quart short after heavy mowing...like those days when you couldn't get to mow it in time to be too high. Seems like the extra load on the engine made it burn that oil. Now when there is no load on the engine mowing regular grass, it doesn't burn any oil.

The engine went retarded on me so I just replaced it. Something weird happened while using the "reverse while mower on button" did something to the engine making it backfire pretty badly. Will pull the bad motor apart to check it for tolerances etc....