Onan 4KY Consuming Oil After Change, Breather Tube/Crankcase
In an effort to get more hands-on in my generator maintenance I inadvertently caused some trouble. Last week I changed my generator oil myself for the first time. I suspect that I didn't allow all of the old oil to drain fully and therefore inadvertently overfilled when adding 1.6 quarts to the system.
When I ran the generator for a few minutes after changing the oil everything seemed fine although the oil level was unexpectedly low. I added more oil, ran it again, low again. In my tunnel-vision of filling oil (and having no prior experience working with my generator) I missed what should have been obvious: the oil was going somewhere, the crankcase breather tube was no longer connected at the air filter compartment and the preheater hose was detached behind the fan. My grasp of generator mechanics is tenuous, but my hunch is that high crankcase pressure led to oil being blown through the breather tube at high enough pressure to disconnect it, and that the disconnected tube knocked the preheater hose loose. (There is no oil leaking from the dipstick seal or the drain plug bolt.)
I put the preheater tube back in its spot and spent a while reconnecting the breather tube to the air filter box, and ran the generator for a couple of hours last night. The generator still consumes a large amount of oil when running and it looks like there are some leaks around the crankcase and crankcase breather tube. Separately, and perhaps related, my choke housing isn't assembled properly. I don't know if it's been like that all along or if it got knocked loose. Photos are included.
Could my problem be that the breather tube and mesh filter are clogged from the initial debacle? If so, is that something I can check and clean? Is it dangerous / bad to use my generator in the meantime, just keeping the oil between "Min" and "Full" (two hours of running it yesterday dropped the oil level from near-full to near-min).
Here are photos, some before reconnecting, some after. I wiped down the top of the crankcase a bit.
http://imgur.com/a/BlDA4
Learning by doing sometimes hurts...
*Onan Model: 4KY FA26100J
When I ran the generator for a few minutes after changing the oil everything seemed fine although the oil level was unexpectedly low. I added more oil, ran it again, low again. In my tunnel-vision of filling oil (and having no prior experience working with my generator) I missed what should have been obvious: the oil was going somewhere, the crankcase breather tube was no longer connected at the air filter compartment and the preheater hose was detached behind the fan. My grasp of generator mechanics is tenuous, but my hunch is that high crankcase pressure led to oil being blown through the breather tube at high enough pressure to disconnect it, and that the disconnected tube knocked the preheater hose loose. (There is no oil leaking from the dipstick seal or the drain plug bolt.)
I put the preheater tube back in its spot and spent a while reconnecting the breather tube to the air filter box, and ran the generator for a couple of hours last night. The generator still consumes a large amount of oil when running and it looks like there are some leaks around the crankcase and crankcase breather tube. Separately, and perhaps related, my choke housing isn't assembled properly. I don't know if it's been like that all along or if it got knocked loose. Photos are included.
Could my problem be that the breather tube and mesh filter are clogged from the initial debacle? If so, is that something I can check and clean? Is it dangerous / bad to use my generator in the meantime, just keeping the oil between "Min" and "Full" (two hours of running it yesterday dropped the oil level from near-full to near-min).
Here are photos, some before reconnecting, some after. I wiped down the top of the crankcase a bit.
http://imgur.com/a/BlDA4
Learning by doing sometimes hurts...
*Onan Model: 4KY FA26100J
