Hello! I have an MTD lawn tractor, about 5 years old. At the start of the season, I changed the oil, plugs, and air filter. Its been running fine until this past weekend. My wife mowed the back yard and parked it. I came back about 10min later to use it for another section of yard. It was very hard to start.. it would sputter and lope then die. After doing this a few times, all it would do was crank and not start. I took off the air filter and tried again. It started right up but continued to sputter and lope and would only run with the choke pulled halfway out. The air filter is soaked with gas. I let it sit over night and the next day I tried again... now it will run a little better with more normal choke operation until I put the air filter back on, then sputter and die. There seems to be a lot of gas spurting up out of the carb... I let it run for 5 min with no filter but the filter cover on and almost the entire pan where the filter sits was wet and there was gas dripping from the filter cover. I can't imagine the new filter is to blame, could it be bad gas or a carb problem? Thanks in advance!

Hi,
It could be a number of things. One thing, that air filter is "toast." Once soaked the pores in the paper plug. Check the oil to see if oil has been contaminated with gas; strongly suspected. That would be inlet neelde problems in the carb.
Other things possible are intake vale problems and a blown head gasket.
Peace,
Clarke

Thank you Clarke, I will get a chance to work on it some this weekend. If it's the inlet needle, how hard is that to fix? Can I take apart the carb, clean it up and put it back together again?