Last fall, I treated the tiller with some Sta-Bil, but by spring, most of it had evaporated. There was a fair amount of varnish in the carb, and it’s taken some doing to get it all clear again.

I have tilled three, maybe four times this season, I want to have the ground like flour when I plant. it’s pretty good now, I’ve been tilling in organics and grass clippings and compost for about ten years.

The tiller, which I got from Calvinis a Troy Bilt. it’s old enough it has like a four digit serial number. And today it wouldn’t start, for the first time in my life, and probably it’s life.

So I pull off the filter, and it’s flooded through and through. I’m amazed it turns over. I pull the float bowl.

The idle passage had been varnished up, but I had cleared that. The main passage had varnished up, but I had cleared that as well. There were plenty of places filled with varnish, and I cleaned them all.

You’d think, wouldn’t you, that fuel that had deposited varnish in so many places and clogged up so many things, would clog a pinhole in a float. But you’d be wrong. The varnish managed to completely clog a 1/16″ hole, and yet leave a hole open (and fill the float with fuel!) through a hole I could only see through the 20 power lens of my desk microscope.

So I did what all 8 year olds do, I put the damned float in the Weber grill, turned the grill on medium, and baked the gas out of the tiny, tiny hole.

Of course I lit it.

And then I put a drop of solder over the hole, and reassembled the tiller, and ran one more trip through the garden. We’ll see how it does long term.