OT: Harbor Freight Predator Gas Engines

Last summer my neighbor considered buying one of HF's Robin engines. He asked a local repair shop for their opinion. "Great engine but we can't get repair parts" was the response. You may want to check your local repair shops for their comments on the predator engine. Art

r Freight's line of Horizontal Gas

Looks like a honda OHV clone, similar to how Lifan and other chinese manufacturers cloned the Honda 200CC dirt-bike engine. Can't get parts for those either! You just hafta buy 2 of 'em...

Dave

r Freight's line of Horizontal Gas

Looking around a bit, it's popular with the mini-bike and go-kart crowd, there are supposedly hop-up parts available.

Dave

My son bought one of those chinese scooters with the Honda clone engine. You can buy any part for those engines from several different online suppliers. Eric

Harbor Freight makes decent stuff - it's perfectly fine for the stated purpose when used properly - Some of my tools are Harbor Freight.

But don't plan on abusing any of their stuff. At All. Won't take it. If you need the tool to work every time, and don't have the space to carry a complete spare set of tools for when it breaks on you... That's the time you go buy the Good Stuff.

They have their own parts department, so you can get the parts for at least a few years - but for major things like a scored cylinder or the main bearings, consider it "Disposable" and get a fresh one when it dies in 5 or 10 years.

You have to figure in whether it's worth several hours of your Labor (even figuring your free time at minimum wage...) and say $75 in repair parts to rebuild a $110 engine. When you hit the tipping point just go buy a fresh engine - and save the old one for the little replacement parts.

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I vaguely remember the Robin offerings... They used to sell a few B&S models too, but alas I waited too long to score one of those.

I'm the repair man, but you bring up a point I hadn't really considered. Usually I just repair/re-condition existing parts to fix'em but of course that isn't always possible depending on which part goes blooey.

I thank everyone for their input, at least nobody said "run-like-hell" away from them ;-)

I've got a couple mini rails for the kids powered by 6.5 HP Subaru Robin engines. They are ok. I mention them because except for paint and lettering they look almost identical to the HF engines.

I built a pressure washer with one of them and a Cat pump off of ebay. I couldn't ask for it to work any better than it does. Engine starts right away, runs strong, seems to get good fuel economy in the 8-10 hours I've run it.

I have heard that the recoil start mechanism is weak and prone to break, but I've not had a problem yet.

I looked over one at the store a while back. It looked a lot like the B&S 6.5hp on my roto-tiller. I remember the recoil start housing though didn't appear to be quite as substantial as the B&S. So you probably heard right and I'll keep that in mind if I decide to buy one. I can handle fixing, making over weak parts like that. What I was mostly concerned about was how the piston, crank, valves... hold together. Kinda hard to inspect those parts before hand and any failure pretty much totals the engine. If it happens after I get my $110 worth of work out of it then I won't mind much :)

Thanks for the info!