Lift engine testing

So I'm getting close to operational and I wanted to bring up my engine.

I found the serial number on the engine and entered it. But no dice,"Found 0 results matching "120502-0116*"" I followed the video, and found the

Briggs and Stratton manual finder failure.

Despite the fact that I followed their video tutorial on how to find the number and I'm quite sure it's right:

The Briggs and Stratton model number printed on the sheet metal above my muffler

I ended up pulling a PDF off of manualsonline.com it wasn't quite the same model, but it at least gave me the basics. Though it did not tell me what the kill switch was.

It's the little wire coming out the front that you need to ground to kill the spark.

I started by stripping down the lift engine to test it unloaded first.

Then I tested the engine. See the timelapse below. The engine was pleasantly quiet unloaded. The throttle worked fine, however the advise I got from the manual about travelling all the way down on the throttle was incorrect. So I needed to find my aligator clips to short out the coil and stop the spark as I thought the extra little wire was for that.

The one thing about starting the engine that was a little disconcerting was that it was quite smoky obviously burning oil. Since I didn't have the real manual I had no idea how much oil to put in. And I was pretty sure the dipstick wasn't working well without turning things over. After a brief search I found the alligator leads and disabled it.

On inspection though I found this pool of oil below the muffler:

Oil pooled below the muffler after the first run.

Now I think that this is ok. The oil I put in is clear and this is defnitely black. So it's not the oil I put in. Which means that it's oil which was already inside the engine. And several times during the assembly process I had turned the motor completely upside down. So I suspect that I put oil into inappropriate places, such as the muffler. After running the oil on the dipstick looked to be right at the full line so I think that's ok. And by the time that I found the alligator clips the exhaust was much cleaner as well so I think the excess oil has mostly burned off now. The manuals aren't very useful for defining first time bringup procedures. But I'm betting that this also might be expected for the first run due to preservatives added during shipping.

 As a side note, the new "eco safe" jerry cans are terrible. I had almost as much fuel running down my hand as I did going into the fuel tank. I don't really know where it was coming from either. Maybe next time I'll try inverting it and relying on their seal to stop it until its pressed into the tank. But standard pouring just doesn't work.