lawn tractor smokes bad?

you dont state whether your briggs is a vertical or horizontal stroke, but there are a couple of common causes of excessive smoking. First and most expensive is that the piston rings are worn or damaged allowing oil to enter the combustion chamber. to test for this I would advise a compression test. Secondly, overfilling the engine oil will cause a lot of white smoke particularly in horizontal engines. the other fairlycommon cause is tilting the engine at an excessive angle as this allows oil to run through the crank breather

graham
January 2011