Bad Advice as Common as Horse Manure

It’s so hard to know whom to trust in this world. Dunning and Kruger have done great damage.

I own a gas-powered EZGO dump cart. I refuse to spell “E-Z-GO” correctly because it’s a pain. It has a 350-cc Subaru Robin motor. The cart is a 2000 model. I got it over 6 years ago, when I moved to this house. I’m not sure what I paid for it, because I got the cart and two tractors for a combined sum. I know I got a deal, because if I had only gotten the bigger of the two tractors for the same amount, I would still have been getting a tremendous bargain.

I first used the cart before I moved here. My dad and I were looking at properties, and we visited this one. The owner told the realtor to turn us loose with the cart so we could see everything.

I drove all over the farm. Slowly. The cart had no pickup, and it moved at a walking pace.

After I bought the cart, it continued to disappoint. I fiddled with it and got it to go somewhat faster, but it was slow to start, it didn’t always make good speed, and sometimes it died after it got hot. I found out it used a lot of oil. One day I checked the dipstick, and the crankcase was nearly dry.

I was afraid I had ruined the piston rings. I also wondered if the previous owner had ruined them and kept it to himself.

The cart produced blue smoke. I can’t say for sure whether it started doing this before or after I ran it with low oil, but I thought maybe I had run it long enough to cause damage.

I went to a forum and asked for help, and I got some good advice and a lot of really bad advice.

A guy who was regarded as a major guru on the forum told me the only way to be sure what was wrong was to tear the motor down. People said I should rebuild it myself. You can do this with a $400 Chinese kit or an EZGO kit that costs way more and can only be bought at a dealership.

Rebuilding requires removing a 100-pound engine and lifting it onto some kind of workbench. Then, of course, you have to reinstall it. The space it goes into is cramped and low to the ground.

While all this was going on, I tried to fix the OEM carb, assuming it, like every other OEM small engine carb on Earth, couldn’t handle low-grade gas with ethanol. I also stopped putting ethanol in the cart. I bought ethanol-free gas. I treated my gas with Biobor EB, which is supposedly the best additive for gas that sits around.

While I was playing with the carb, I broke a little pot metal post that held the pin that held the float. Having nothing to lose, I used JB Weld to put it back together, and it lasted over a year. Finally, I bought a Chinese carb. The forum people said it would never work, and it wasn’t perfect, until I put the jet from the old carb in it. After that, the carb was not an issue.

The cart has been very useful to me. Over the years, in spite of a lot of down time, I’ve done a great deal with it. It’s great for collecting and dumping weeds. I load saws in it and cut up problem trees. I use it to spray the yard. If it had been more dependable, I would have gotten a lot more done with it.

At some point, the cart became useless. I could not trust it to get me around the yard, let alone the farm. I had to find out what was wrong and make a decision: rebuild or repower.

I found a Youtube video by a young black man. He said it was rare for these engines to put out blue smoke because of bad rings. He said the cause was nearly always bad valve seals.

Valve seals are little ring-shaped things that sit on top of cylinder heads. The valve shafts go through them. As the valves to up and down, the seals keep oil from going into the cylinders around the shafts. They wipe the oil off. The seals should be tight.

Unlike a quality engine, the Subaru Robin uses cheap seals that wear out fast. The openings enlarge and can become egg-shaped. Then oil goes into the cylinders and out into the muffler. It can actually accumulate in the muffler so you get burning oil every time the exhaust heats up. I have read it can block the muffler, but I wonder if that’s really true.

In the video, the mechanic said you rotate your cam until the pistons are at top dead center. This holds the pistons up against the valves so the valves can’t fall into the cylinder. Then you take off the valve cover, remove the cam, remove the valve springs (he uses a trick involving a 3/4″ wrench), pull out the seals, put new ones in, and do everything in reverse.

You also have to loosen a couple of covers on the sides of the engine to do all this. It’s a pain, but it’s way easier than removing the engine, which others say is the right way to do it.

I did all these things. I also did some stupid things that didn’t work, but I’ll focus on the things I did right.

The forum guys said to jam rope into the cylinders to keep the valves from falling. I saw someone providing a ridiculously difficult method to get the valve springs out.

When I put the valve train back together, I had to adjust the valve clearance. If your valve clearance is too small, your valves will never close all the way. I didn’t know that, but I knew the clearance had to be adjusted. Ordinarily, you measure the clearance with a feeler gauge.

I found another Youtube guy, and he said to forget the feeler gauge. He said to bottom out the valves and the back off a quarter of a turn.

Screws can be used to make very precise adjustments, so it sounded reasonable. I tried his method.

While this was going on, I received a compression gauge I had ordered. I checked my compression and got 35 psi. You want at least 130. I figured the engine was done, so I started gathering information about repowering.

The best option I found was an Amazon Duromax 440-cc engine with a kit from a company called Vegas Carts. Total cost around $1600.

I thought this was better than buying a rebuilt engine of mysterious origin for over $800. The original engine, at its best, is underpowered, and with no factory support, it’s not easy to keep them running.

You can get a 670-cc V-twin from Honda or Harbor Freight, and it will give you 22 horsepower and a dangerous top speed, but it’s way more than the cart needs, and it’s expensive. A 440-cc engine will spin the rear wheels in dirt.

I learned about repowering before I got the compression gauge. I mentioned the bad result on the forum, and someone said I should make sure my valve clearance was right. This was the first time I became aware that valve clearance could affect compression.

I had already used the quarter-turn folk wisdom method to ajust the valves, but I figured I should do it right, so that’s what I did. I put the gauge on a cylinder, expecting 35 psi, and I got 150.

Leaving the bad old gas in the tank, I got in the driver’s seat and tried to start the cart. It fired right up. I took it out and drove it all over the farm. I gave it plenty of time to heat up. No blue smoke. It didn’t stall. It was still wimpy off the line, but that was normal.

My cart was fixed.

I didn’t have to remove the motor. I didn’t have to shove rope in the cylinders. No rebuild. No new engine. If I had fixed the seals in 2017, I would never have thought I needed a new carb.

Finally, I have a cart that actually works.

With the compression I’m getting and the amount of time I put in driving the cart, I should be able to go 20 years without any more problems.

So how did the forum gurus turn out to be so wrong? How did they manage to be outsmarted completely by a young man with an obscure Youtube video? He knows more about the cart’s problems than they do, even though some of them have worked on many, many carts. He knows how to repair them better than they do.

There must have been a million EZGO carts made over the years. A lot of them must have had Robin engines. My engine hit the market at least 30 years ago. How can it be that people who should know how to fix them still give incredibly bad advice?

I used to treat the cart with indifference, because I thought it wasn’t worth much, and it seemed to be in bad shape. Now I feel like sprucing it up and spending money on it. As it sits, it may be worth $5000. It’s hard to find good information about the value. The forum people say the value doubles when the original engine is included. I would like LED lighting to replace the feeble headlights, and I could use some kind of hooks to hold my pole saw.

I wonder how many engines have been discarded or rebuilt needlessly because of bad advice from mechanics and people on forums.

It’s amazing how little a person’s reputation means. So often, people with lofty reputations turn out to be useless and chronically wrong.

I appreciate the effort to help. I truly do. I don’t want to be an ingrate. But I am still puzzled by the difficulty I had, getting the right information.

If you have a Robin engine that doesn’t work right, change your seals before you do anything else.