Briggs 18 HP has me stumped!

Savinsam

Member
I have a B & S twin cyl. mower engine that won't start after using it for many years. I have little to no spark at the plugs. Mower has strong battery & good starter. I assumed that the coil went bad. (I've replaced it a couple times before.) I put a new one on and properly gapped it. Still same results. So, figured it must be the stator. I replaced it with another one from a decent running engine. Still same results. With ignition "on", the wire to the coil has good voltage. Is there a way to bench test stators with a multimeter to determine whether a stator is good? I'm at a loss as to what to check next. Can a new coil be bad right out of the box? Thanks for any help. Sam
 
Being you only mention 'the coil' and not coils, I assume you have the opposed twin engine which only uses one ignition coil.

If you have ANY voltage on the wire to your ignition coil (its actually an ignition module-it contains the ignition trigger circuit too.) that is the problem. And feeding 12v. to an ignition module is a quick way to ruin the trigger. That little wire is to ground the spark when you want to stop. It should be connected back through the wiring harness to the ignition switch where, when the switch is in the off position, it is connected to ground.

Is there any chance you changed the ignition switch recently? I've ran into several instances where my customer went to the box store and got a switch that looked 'right'-it had the same number of tabs on the back, but those pins didn't work the same circuits as the original switch.

The stator that charges the battery has nothing to do with ignition on those engines.
 
Thank you TRK for advice. It's been quite awhile since I've worked on these engines. Okay, now that I know that the wire to coils is not supposed to have voltage, if I disconnect it, should I then be able to get spark to plugs? I've not messed with ignition switch at all. Apparently there's a short somewhere. I'm going to disconnect that wire and see what happens. Do you think that I've cooked the new coil?
 

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