Sounds like you were looking under the hood of a GC mower engine.
They use a wax pellat that expands with heat.
Its reacts pretty fast, but long term they have issues with all those heating and cooling cycles the wax leaks out, then they don;t work.
The whole GC engine is a lot of compromise to get costs down.
When the dust settles you have to look at do you want a Honda built cheap enough to compete with a Chinese clone of a GXV engine.
Will spend the money to buy a real commercial or would you rather a second rate copy.
I think a second rate copy of a great engine is probably better than grade A build designed to be cheap as possible…
Im not a big fan of ANY Honda choke.
Kohler had the best system with the first generation XT “autochoke” because it combined a by metallic spring and vac pull off.
Trouble is as built they could not be tuned ( I made mine adjustable as you can see in the photos )
This is absolutely flawless.
But the EPA would not allow you to set how rich you want your choke and as built the tolerances are all over the place.
See, you cant adjust the dam thing, its WAY too lean after a few heat cycles.
Correction:
You were talking about the version on the GVX commercial.?
Not really automatic you have to set it.
I’m not really a fan, you can;t build a remote start engine around it.
Upon closer examination of the video this is just another stinking GCV and they gave up on the wax pellat because it was too unreliable
You know I have a GCV in the bone yard.
I am so unimpressed with it I never bothered to try and fix it.
Its not old…
I had a briggs powered self proppel unit dropped off a few weeks ago .
Its engine is an even bigger steamer rather than repair I places it with what I used to consider THE steamer of the lawn mowers a Techumseh…
A quality Chinese engine you can trust
I am going to go out right now in fact and fire up the blue Mongoloid and mow.
I got a lot to mow and there are things hidden in the grass that make mowers die.
But not my good Chinese mower, that’s just for my yard…
The mongoloid is for my neighbors field of wheat where I need 7hp of gas swilling, oil burning furry to hack through.
And if it dies a trainwreck? Puft…
it was just junk anyways, I have that Honda I can wreck next…
Grass Season is almost over and the mongoloid snow blower season is next
Another one bites the dust
And some mowing music