Thanks everybody for your concern and interest.
Yesterday I was contacted by Kioti customer service via email and also had a phone call from the dealership. Here's the news.
Apparently this matter went all the way back to Daedong in Korea. After careful review, they have decided to replace this engine with a new one, supposedly shipping from the US office in North Carolina, but that's not confirmed. It might have to be sent overseas from Korea. Not sure yet which is correct. Daedong has also stipulated that the dealer will provide the labor for the engine swap. From what I have gleaned through this process, it's my understanding that each dealership is annually rewarded by Kioti with "goodwill" dollars, earned by meeting sales quotas and whatnot. That money is reserved for cases like mine, when they need to pay their own mechanics for this type of in-house work. So, the dealer isn't really out anything here because Kioti provides a kind of safety net through the earned goodwill money. Maybe this is a common practice for all manufacturers; I don't know.
Obviously it's still going to take some time before the CK35 is ready to come home, but you can imagine what a huge relief this is for me. Those of you on this forum who urged me to contact Kioti, and to go back to the dealer, are the ones who are directly responsible for securing this very fortunate turn of events for me. I can't begin to thank you enough. In the beginning when I started this thread, I was ready to write off this tractor and recover what little money out of it that I could get from its broken condition. You folks convinced me to pursue it further. Everything changed in a few hours one afternoon when I spoke to Melissa at Kioti and then drove back to the dealership with hat in hand. That part wasn't easy... I had fired them for ignoring me for eighteen days, and then I had to go back and re-hire them. But, it certainly paid off to do so.
Once again, many thanks to everyone who contributed to this discussion, especially a few key folks here who offered some seriously good advice -- you know who you are. There's still more to follow regarding this issue... if I can figure out how to do it, I'll upload some video of the tractor running before it was diagnosed (before I knew how bad it was) to demonstrate what it sounded like, on the slim outside chance that anyone else ever suffers this problem. Meanwhile, those of you who speculated that Kioti would acquit themselves nicely and take the high road by providing out-of-warranty support were absolutely right, as were those of you who called for engine replacement. I did not expect and certainly could not have asked for a better outcome from Kioti.
Thanks Kioti and especially all you TBN folks.
