KE4AVB isn't the only one with a 445 in the shop. A customer brought me one that lacked power. It has an EFI FD620D Kawasaki. I don't know the spec number. Customer says it ran fine one day, and then the next time he tried to use it, it was suddenly running like it didn't have any power. He took a wild stab at the problem and got a new MAP sensor for it, but that didn't fix anything. He told me that the hose coming from the MAP sensor needed to be plugged or else it wouldn't run at all. It runs poorly enough as it is. John Deere told him it sounded like a control board gone bad, which is $1500 from them. So he brought it to me to see if I could do anything with it. Long story short, I disconnected the muffler, and it runs MUCH better, plenty of power. So I'm thinking the only problem was restricted exhaust. But I noticed that the engine ran pretty rich with the muffler off. Is this because I have the muffler off, or is a rich running condition the cause of the exhaust becoming restricted? I guess it's kind of a chicken/egg conundrum (though I'm pretty sure the chicken came first).
Or I guess it could be the plugged hose from the MAP sensor, which I forgot to even look for. Not too swift on EFI systems, so I don't know if that would have anything to do with this or not. What do you think?