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Well....not exactly. Last fall as it got colder it got harder and harder to start. I cleaned the carb over the winter and found that the air/fuel screw was missing an oring. I don't know if it was an issue or not but I didn't think I could find just the little oring and the whole carb was pretty cheap so I replaced it. The new carb has the air fuel screw at 1 1/2 turns and the idle screw is set so the throttle plate is just cracked open a little bit. I made sure the bowl fills with gas (and it isn't coming out of the overflow) and went to start and it cranks but wont start. When i checked the plug after cranking it a bunch the plug was not wet but did smell of gas. I checked compression and I'm over 100psi so I took a bit of fuel line, dipped it in the gas and trapped a bit of gas and put that directly in through the sparkplug hole and tried cranking it again. If it were a fuel air issue it should have started and run for a minute or two with that much gas in the cylinder. It didn't start so I started looking at the spark itself and there is definately more than a second between sparks when I'm cranking it.

I have some experience with small engines but I'm no expert. The tach I have is inductive and it wraps around the plug wire. If it's showing 180rpm when i'm cranking then, being a 4 stroke, I would think that means I should see 45 sparks per minute or roughly 1 a second (please tell me if i'm wrong). I'm gonna say I'm much closer to 2 seconds than 1 second. Trouble is that I don't know what it should look like normally.

I'm open to suggestions on what to check if anyone has any. I still had the original plug and I tried that but it made no difference. I suppose both could be bad so I'll pick up another new one today. Beyond that I'm not sure where to go with this.