Stens Spark Plug Cap 135-226 Compatible With Honda

This Stens 135-226 Spark Plug Cap (or Boot) cost me $6.95 in a $606.95 repair of my 2009 Craftsman 24” Snowblower! It has a “Craftsman” branded 179 cc Powermore engine, similar to all the Chinese built Powermore engines used in MTD products under many brand names (Cub Cadet, Craftsman, Troy-Bilt, Remington, and many others). I have also have a Powermore engine in my 2015 Craftsman rear-engine riding mower. Both of those engines have a spark plug boot with a metal case covering the entire thing (I’ll try to attach photos). Look up the inside, and you see a rubber boot, and it appears hard-wired to the spark plug wire. These boots can be a real pain to get off a buried spark plug, BTW.

My snowblower ran perfectly for 8 seasons, and I was religious about maintenance. In its 9th winter, it inexplicably quit, and would die every time I engaged the auger. I took the carb apart- it was clean. I cleaned it anyhow, but no luck. I could slowly engage the auger and it ran fine, but with a quick push of the lever, it died every time. Naturally, this happened during the worst winter storm we’ve seen in years. I didn’t have any means of getting this behemoth into a shop, and wasn’t going to invest $200 to $300 in a machine that was 9 years old, so I bought a new, smaller one for $600.

Later, I went to look into the situation again and took out the spark plug, even though the engine ran well. After popping off the metal covered boot, it fell to the floor! It wasn’t a rubber boot- it was hard plastic. It had cracked apart, and it was easy to see the burn marks where it had been arcing to the metal cover. I took the boot to my (pretty knowledgeable) local mower/snowblower dealer, but he had no clue. They don’t normally work on Powermore engines, and it might as well have come from Mars. He gave me a normal clamp-on end for a spark plug wire and said to try it. Otherwise, I’d have to buy the whole coil (see photo: coil assembly) for about $70, and see IF that was my problem. Tearing it apart would be a lot of work, or have it hauled in and the repair would still be around $250… IF that was my auger problem. Hours of Internet research provided no answers.

Well, about half an inch of the plastic end was still attached to the plug wire. -Went to remove it, and it UNSCREWED easily, with a threaded screw built into the end of the hard plastic boot. I’m a Baby Boomer who, like many people, was used to little rubber spark plug boots on Briggs & Stratton engines. This thing was very foreign to me, and to my friends, and to my local shop.

Turns out this is a HONDA style spark plug CAP. Duh- I had known the engines are supposedly Honda clones. This Stens cap looked like a possible answer, so I figured I’d throw another $6.95 at the problem and see what happened.

It worked perfectly, took 30 seconds to install, and the the snowblower fired right up. Problem solved. And the Stens is a better design than the original. If you look at it, it has a built-in handle to help you take the boot off the spark plug. I might add some insulated tape to protect it from the heat of the muffler.

I will install one of these to replace that miserable metal boot on my riding mower in the Spring, because it’s also a pain to get off.

Long story short- if you have an MTD Powermore engine with that long metal boot attached to a hard-to-reach plug, this could solve a problem. Heed my expensive lesson: Even if you don’t have a cracked plug cap yet, replace yours with this for an easier job of changing your spark plug. At least I now have a single-stage snowblower to go with the 2-stage, and can pick the best one for the situation. And my neighbors can all thank me that we’ll probably get little if any snow from January to April!

Quick delivery. Fit as it should! Easy install.

Easy install and an exact replacement for the cap on a Generac GP5500 generator

@ keystone motorsports… thanks for mentioning it fits a Honda ATC. The 250Rs have a weird angle and short, just long enough coil wire. This actually fit my ’86 and worked to replace the obsolete original. Thanks

Good product for my generator plus a easy installation