String Trimmers

when engines die suddenly it is almost always electrical in nature.  Personally I have only bought two new carbs for my OPE in my almost 40 years of repairs.  One for an old (left outside) snow blower I got dirt cheap and another for a lawn mower that someone repaired and lost carb parts for.  Gas vents and soft gas lines won't cause sudden deaths when running.  They act more like a plugged exhaust screen, bogging down and slow acceleration.  Vacuum leaks can give varied problems.  If an engine seal is slowly dying it will respond with sluggish acceleration (like that exhaust problem) or simply not let your engine start because it can't suck gas from the carb into the crankcase.  Dirty carbs give similar responses.  How do you determine which it is?  If you use a 50:1 gas ratio them you probably don't have a plugged exhaust screen.  Does the engine performance seem to be getting sluggish more and more each week?  Make a compression check, if the engine runs when you squirt gas into the carb then you probably have a vacuum leak in the crankcase.  Rear gasket or front seal, either is possible.  the rear gasket is the easiest to check, the front seal is more involved and requires lots of speculation and tearing apart the weed eater.  Unless you have a high end trimmer, this is the last resort repair work.  Save your money on replacement gas tanks and fuel lines or carb work when your engine dies suddenly.  Luckily points and condensers are a thing of the past except for some older Stihl gear.  Probably the weirdest electrical problem encountered (like the spark plug wire listed here somewhere) is a broken on-off switch that was hard to see.  Weak sparks are subjective to what you have seen in the past and the current use of resistor plugs.  Plugs act a little differently in a cylinder under compression and with wet gas.  Gas is a conductor and will short out a plug with a weak spark.  New coil time.