This page describes how content on Still Worth Starting is researched, what is allowed to appear on it, what is deliberately kept off it, how often it is re-checked, and what happens when it turns out to be wrong.
It is written to be specific enough to be held to. If you find a page that breaks one of these rules, that is a correction worth sending — see the bottom of this page.
One named author, and the narrow claim being made
Woojoong Kim. There is one author, and there is no anonymous byline anywhere on the site. See About for who that is and, more importantly, what they are not: this site is not written by a small-engine mechanic and does not claim trade experience.
The authority claim here is narrow and, I think, defensible: the information was compiled from primary sources, the sources are named, and the date it was checked is on the page. Where that claim would not hold, the page says so instead of covering the gap with confident phrasing.
The safety scope — what this site will not publish
This comes before the sourcing rules because it overrides them. A fact can be perfectly sourced and still not belong on this site.
Pages here describe what a repair involves and what it costs. They do not teach you to perform it. Specifically, this site does not publish step-by-step procedures for:
- Chainsaw chain work — tensioning, sharpening, replacement, or carburetor idle adjustment. A saw with a mis-set idle can drive the chain while it appears to be at rest.
- Blade removal, sharpening or balancing on any mower. The blade is bolted to a spinning shaft and an unbalanced one destroys a deck.
- Carburetor and fuel-system disassembly, on any machine.
- Clearing a snowblower auger or chute by hand. Stored energy in the auger and impeller can turn them after the engine is off.
For each of these, the page points to your machine’s operator manual and to a servicing dealer, and explains the cost so you can judge the quote you are given.
This is a scope decision about what gets written, not a disclaimer bolted to the bottom of a page. A safety notice under bad instructions does not fix the instructions. The broader hazard list — fuel vapor, hot exhaust, recoil spring tension, carbon monoxide — is in the Terms of Use, §2.
Source tiers, and the rule that specs follow the engine
Sources are ranked. Higher tiers override lower ones on any conflict.
Tier 1 — manufacturer documentation. Service manuals, operator manuals, parts catalogs, warranty documents and product spec pages published by the company that built the thing being described. This is the only acceptable source for the technical identifiers this site publishes: part numbers, spark plug gaps, oil types and capacities, torque figures, shear-pin specs and rated capacities. Two categories that would obviously belong on that list appear nowhere here — valve clearances, and chainsaw chain pitch and gauge — because the pages that would carry them stop at the repair-or-replace decision and hand the procedure and the part selection to a dealer.
There is a rule inside that rule, and the popular version of it is too crude to use. It is usually stated as specifications follow the engine, not the machine — a Cub Cadet mower with a Briggs & Stratton engine documented by Briggs for everything engine-related and by Cub Cadet for the rest. Manuals do not divide that cleanly. Toro’s operator’s manual for the Z480 TimeCutter (Form No. 3353-200 Rev B, model 74352), which this site’s mower no-start page cites, specifies the spark plug, its 0.030-inch gap, its 30 ft-lb torque, the oil type and a crankcase capacity of 48 or 56 ounces depending on whether the filter is changed — and never names the engine’s brand anywhere in the document. It says only that a separate Engine Owner’s Manual is enclosed, and that “Replacements may be ordered through the engine manufacturer.”
So the rule as applied here is narrower, and it is about transplanting rather than about which logo is on the cover: a figure is good only for the machine whose document it came from. Carrying a Briggs plug gap onto a Kohler-engined mower because both are 21-inch walk-behinds is the failure this rule exists to stop, and this site treats it as a sourcing failure rather than a rounding error. Every specification here names the document it came from, so you can tell whether that document describes your machine before you act on the number.
Tier 2 — government, regulatory and standards bodies. The Code of Federal Regulations (small-engine emissions rules under 40 CFR Part 1054 are cited throughout), the Consumer Product Safety Commission’s standards, NOAA/NCEI climate normals, national laboratory research, and equivalent bodies in Canada.
Tier 2a — primary law, read from the body that enacted or codifies it. Statutes and regulations sit inside Tier 2 but are worth stating separately, because this site now cites them on thirteen pages — twelve of the thirty articles, plus the About page — and they behave unlike an agency publication. Federal regulations (40 CFR Part 1054 on engine useful life and on the emission-related warranty every small-engine maker must carry, 40 CFR Part 1068 on the grounds for denying a claim under it, on which components it covers, and on when a used or rebuilt engine may lawfully replace a certified one, 40 CFR Part 1060 on the separate two-year warranty covering fuel tanks, caps and lines and on the certification a new replacement fuel tank or fuel line must carry, 16 CFR 1205 on mower blade controls), federal statutes (the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act at 15 U.S.C. §§ 2302, 2303 and 2304, the standard gauge and its tolerance at 15 U.S.C. §§ 206 and 208) and state statutes — Minnesota, Wisconsin, Maine and South Carolina are cited here — are quoted from the legislature’s or the government’s own text, and the section and subdivision are named so you can open the same words rather than a summary of them.
Four rules apply to that tier and to nothing else here. A section number is an address, and it is checked as one — a wrong subdivision leaves the link resolving and the quotation plausible. A rule’s own consumer-facing summary is not the rule. Where a law makes a shop post a notice, that notice is a simplification written by the legislature, and this site quotes the operative section rather than the sign. The same applies one step out, where a regulation orders the regulated company to summarize it: 40 CFR 1054.120(e) requires every small-engine maker to describe the emission warranty in its owner’s manual, so the booklet page is a summary of the rule written by the party the rule binds, and the smoking page reads it against the section rather than instead of it. The quote-reading page does the same with two of one maker’s emission warranty statements, which word the same limit differently — one tracking the regulation’s caused by, the other saying subjected to — which is the clearest case on this site for why the section number is worth having. And the law of one state is not the law of your state. Where a page rests on a statute, it names the state in the sentence, not in a footnote. And a republisher is not the publisher. Private services reproduce the Code of Federal Regulations accurately — this site compared Cornell’s Legal Information Institute against the eCFR section by section on the Part 1054, Part 1060 and Part 1068 material and found no difference in the operative text — but a citation here opens the government’s own copy: the eCFR or govinfo.gov for federal regulations and statutes, the enacting legislature for a state statute, and the promulgating agency for a state regulation — the California Air Resources Board publishes its own small off-road engine rules, so that is where this site’s California citations point — engine labeling, the exhaust standards that decide which categories may still be sold with an engine, and the emission warranty statement whose prescribed wording turns up in manufacturer booklets sold nationwide. A page that says it re-verified a citation against a particular publisher links to that publisher.
What this site does not do with law is tell you what it means for your dispute. Pages here report what a provision says and hand the argument to the state attorney general’s office or a lawyer. Nothing on this site is legal advice.
Tier 3 — research and datasets with a published methodology. Studies that state their sample, method and funding. These are cited with the method attached, because the method is usually why two sources disagree — and with the funding attached where it could bear on the finding.
Tier 4 — cost aggregators and named businesses. Published cost guides, and the published price lists and service menus of individual repair shops. Useful, often the only thing available, and always attributed by name with the shop’s location. One shop’s menu is a data point, not a national average, and pages here say so.
Not a source at all: other outdoor-power-equipment blogs. Nothing here is sourced from a competing content site, an AI summary, a forum post, or an unattributed figure found in a search result.
That last rule exists for a specific reason and it is sharper here than on a general-interest site. Repair blogs copy each other’s technical figures, and the errors propagate — and a wrong plug gap, oil capacity or shear-pin spec can damage a machine or injure the person following it. A wrong figure republished fifty times looks like a consensus and is still wrong.
Six rules, and none of them bend
These are absolute. A claim that cannot satisfy them is cut, not softened.
- No fabricated figures. No invented statistic, price, specification or test finding. If a claim needs a number and no source has it, the claim is removed rather than estimated. Where a number is arithmetic performed on published figures rather than a figure someone published, the page labels it as such.
- No claimed first-hand experience. Nothing here says “in our shop,” “we tested,” or “after three seasons.” No machine discussed on this site has been tested by the author. Where the site knows something, it knows it because it was looked up.
- Uncertainty is attributed, not asserted. “Published repair costs range from…” rather than “repairs cost…”. Where two credible sources disagree, both are shown and the disagreement is explained instead of averaged away.
- Gaps are stated and left visible. Where a figure could not be found, the page says so and the cell stays empty. The lifespan fields for chainsaws and string trimmers on this site are blank for exactly this reason: the only published figure describes full-time professional use, and scaling it by a guess would manufacture research.
- Sources are linked at the point of claim — at the figure, the table or the quote they support, rather than only in a list at the foot of the page. Pages here do also close with a source roll-up, and that roll-up earns its place: it carries the date each source was read, the location of each shop quoted, and the provenance of documents that cannot be linked at all, such as the dealer-only Briggs & Stratton flat-rate form. What the rule forbids is a source reachable only from that list, because a reader standing at the number then has nothing to check it against.
- Conclusions follow the evidence, including when it contradicts an earlier page here. Where better sourcing reverses a conclusion, the reversal is made rather than left to sit alongside the old version, and once a page is published a reversal that changes its advice is noted on the page itself. The same applies when a source contradicts itself: the snowblower buying guide shows Toro’s product page giving two different warranty classes for the same machine, and settles it against the binding warranty document instead of picking the convenient one.
Re-verification, on three clocks
Content that was accurate in August 2026 will not stay accurate, and different kinds of figures decay at very different speeds. This site runs three schedules rather than one default:
- Catalog and retailer prices: about three months. These are the most perishable thing published here and also the site’s main contribution, so they carry the risk twice. Two engine prices cited on this site were gone from the supplier’s page within three days of being read — which is the reason this clock exists as a separate one.
- Manufacturer specifications, service-manual figures, regulatory citations and climate data: six to twelve months. These do not move on a retail cycle.
- A page built on a dated window, or on a buying season, is pulled forward to before that date — shorter than either clock above where it has to be. The mower-and-snowblower buying calendar is reviewed in September rather than November because the promotional windows it tabulates expire on the manufacturer’s calendar, not on this site’s.
Most pages carry both kinds of figure, and where they do, the shorter clock governs. A brand comparison built out of warranty documents is specification work, but if it also prints a parts-catalog price to the cent then the catalog price is what will go wrong first, and the page is reviewed on the three-month schedule.
Every page carrying prices or specifications displays the month it was last verified and the month it is next due, both on the page rather than in metadata you cannot see. At review the cited source is re-opened and the figure re-read — not the draft, the source. A wrong price is invisible from inside a page where it looks perfectly plausible and is correctly attributed.
Pages are researched and drafted well before they appear. This site opened with its library already written rather than publishing into an empty archive, so the early publication dates cluster and say nothing about how long any one page took. The verification date printed on each page is the one that does.
Sending a correction, and what happens to it
Corrections are welcome and are the fastest way this site improves. Email is the route today — hello@stillworthstarting.com. A contact form will reach the same inbox once it is built; it is not live yet, so please email rather than wait for it. Naming the page and the figure is what makes a correction fast to act on.
What happens when you send one:
- A factual error — a wrong price, a mis-transcribed part number or spec, a dead source link, a claim the cited source does not support — is checked against the source and, if confirmed, fixed. The page is updated and its verification date reset.
- A safety concern — anything on this site that reads as an instruction to do something hazardous — goes to the front of the queue ahead of everything else, including corrections to prices.
- A material correction — one that changes the advice a page gives rather than a detail within it — is noted on the page itself, so the change is visible rather than silent.
- A disagreement about interpretation is a fair thing to raise and will get a considered reply, but will not necessarily change the page. If the published sources say something different from what shop experience suggests, the page will generally keep reporting what the sources say and note the tension.
If a correction turns out to be right and the original error came from a source this site trusted, that source’s tier gets reconsidered too.
Who has input into what gets published
This site is intended to be supported by display advertising. It is not running yet; what it will mean in practice, and what the advertising partners will collect, is set out in advance in the Privacy Policy.
What it does not mean: no advertiser, ad network, manufacturer, dealer or retailer has any input into what is published here. No page is sponsored, and none has been paid for, reviewed or approved by a company it discusses. Several pages are directly unflattering to major manufacturers and to the pricing practices of repair shops, and that is the test of whether this paragraph is true.
Where the site links to a retailer, dealer or manufacturer, it is because that is where the information came from.
How AI is used here, and how it is not
Because it is a fair question to ask of any site publishing at this volume: AI tools are used in producing this content — for drafting, structuring, and working through published material.
They are not used as a source. That is the distinction that matters, and it is worth being precise about rather than reassuring. A language model is a fluent writer and an unreliable rememberer; anything it produces from memory is a plausible-sounding guess. In this subject that guess can be a plug gap or an oil capacity, which is why the Tier 1 rule above is written as narrowly as it is. Nothing here is written from memory. Every factual claim traces to a specific published document — a service manual, a parts catalog listing, a warranty PDF, a regulation, a shop’s own price page — and that document is linked at the point the claim is made.
It would be easy to write that the checking is all done by hand, and it would not be true. The source-fetching and cross-checking passes are tooled too: citations are re-resolved in bulk to catch links that have died, and figures appearing on more than one page are compared against each other to catch the drift that creeps into content published at volume. That tooling has caught real defects here — including a cost figure that had been silently merged from two ranges the source publishes separately, which produced nonsense once it was divided against a machine price. Each was fixed and recorded rather than quietly patched.
What is not automated is accountability. A named person decides what goes up and answers for it, and the sourcing rules above are written down so you can check the work rather than take it on trust. Every number here is linked to where it came from, and the honest test of this policy is whether those links hold up when you click them.
Last updated August 2026.