I started it up today in my driveway and there was massive grey/blue smoke for the first few seconds. Would this indicate a carb being flooded? I just rebuilt them a few weeks ago but this problem was happening before the rebuild. The only thing I did before that was rebuild the fuel pump. Is it possible to screw that up and cause the problems I'm having. I hate second guessing myself but everything ive done has been a first for me.

Fuel pump is a definate possibility. Does this engine have oil injection on it?

Yes it has oil injection. I already replaced the crank case check valve.

Have you checked to make sure your not pumping oil back into the crankcase from your oil tank? I had the real bad smoky starts on mine and found that I was overfilling my oil tank and it was pumping oil back into the crankcase when I shut it off.

My tank is only half full and the color of the smoke leads me to believe its burning excess gas. I did have the fast idle lever up pretty high so it kind of roared to life. POssibly that had something to do with all the smoke. I guess I'll look at the carbs and fuel pump one more time before taking it out again.

Is it possible the float levels wee set wrong during the carbs rebuild? Allowing to much gas into the cylyinders and loading the engine down at idle/start up. I suspect if this was the case you would see gas coming out of the carbs at low speed as well.


Kamikaze

The floats were right on the money so I didn't make any adjustments. I went and restarted the motor without lifting up the high speed idle lever and there was very little smoke. I'll let it sit overnight and try again tomorrow. I plan to take it out on friday and see what happens after running for a while.

check the stator

I didn't take it out today but did run it in my driveway and pulled the plug wires. Here's what I found. All had spark. Cylinders 4, 5, and 6 caused the engine to noticeably bog down when I pulled the wires. 1,2,and 3 did not cause the same change in engine speed. They did however have spark and when I put the wire close enough to the plug the spark jumped and caused a slight pick up in rpm's. Can anyone tell me what this means???

how are you numbering your cylinders?