Fixing A Honda Mower That Won't Start

I was looking at my favorite website trying to find a mower blower or even a string trimmer I could pick up for free when I happened to find this beauty now mind you it didn't look like this when I picked it up but after a bit of cleaning as you can see it now looks almost brand new however looks can be very deceiving and after looking at it I soon realized why they gave it away and now I'm kind of regretting ever having picked it up in today's video we're going to be looking at this Honda lawn mower and the problem is that I just picked it up and I'm not really sure what's wrong with it but more than likely I'm gonna guess that it's not going to start otherwise why else would they give it away having said that that phrase will come back to haunt me in the end just to let you know if you want to see what this mower looked like before I hosed it down with about 15 gallons of water and about a half a bottle of Degreaser check the link out at the top of the screen or at the end of the video and when you do you can have a hard time realizing that that is the same mower as this one now I'm going to try and repair this lawnmower but yours might be a little different so this might not work on yours so if things are not working out for you like in the video please ask about it and be glad to answer your questions now it's not every day that you find a free Honda lawnmower being given away so I was very lucky when I happened to find this one now when I saw the ad it only been posted for about 11 minutes when I made contact with them and fortunately I happened to be the first one but after meeting up with them they told me they were bombarded with messages by dozens of people which you really can't blame them now the first thing that I wanted do is to check all the fluids in this mower if all else fails with this project I might have to use it for parts and whatever gasoline might be in it but unfortunately this fuel tank is dry which to be honest I rather prefer to be empty at least I know that whatever fuel I put into it is probably going to get to the carb versus being blended with any old fuel that might still be in the lines now hopefully we'll have better luck with the oil and it won't be empty like the fuel tank and well I guess I still have a bit of luck left over after getting this mower because even though the oil is not full it's at least showing up on the dipstick now the only thing left to do is to open the magical fuel valve which everyone seems to get hung up about and then try starting it so unfortunately it didn't even try and start which is not a good sign at all now on this particular design the lever that controls the throttle is also the choke lever and what sometimes happens is that this system will fail to properly choke the carb now to confirm that the choke system has failed I'm going to remove the air filter and its cover so that we can inspect how the choke flap is working now at this point I do have the choke lever moved to the full choke position and the flap should be closed but as you can see the flap is not fully closed I'd say it's less than halfway closed which is not enough to help start this engine now moving the lever to the Run position moves the flap all the way open which is great but that's still not going to help us out and of course moving the lever back to the full choke position still has a closing to the same position as before now before we go on I still need to confirm that the engine will start and run but without a working choke that means it's not going to start without a bit of help and I intend on helping it out by priming the engine with some fuel everything foreign so the good news is that after priming the engine it not only started but it kept running that means we only need to fix the choke system and we should be good but only when we're talking about the engine the drive system is a totally different monster so the self-propelled works but it doesn't have enough power to actually move the mower along the ground which if you didn't know for a Honda like this one is a bit unusual now it might not be working only because it hasn't been used in a long time so I'm going to try that again I'm also not going to Prime the engine so hopefully it's warm enough that we don't need to so with all the testing and inspection being done can you guess why they got rid of this mower well more than likely it's because it was almost impossible to start unless the mower was hot from sitting in the sun and of course a self-propelled system that didn't work well would be enough for most people to get rid of it now we could try to adjust the self-propelled cable at the anchor to get it to work but since the drive system still activates but has no power I'm leaning to a worn out belt instead there's just one issue we need to First figure out the choke system and get the engine running before we even worry about the drive system now since the engine is somewhat warm I'm going to take this opportunity to drain the oil now doing it this way while it's warm will do a better job of getting the majority of the oil out of the engine now the oil that came out of the engine isn't all that terrible looking believe me I've seen a lot worse but at this moment oil is still cheap so it's good insurance to just change it once that's done we'll go back to the choke system now if I move the choke lever you can see how the cable moves all the other arms and linkages to try and work the choke flap but it doesn't seem to be working it well enough to in engage the system like it should be now the lever that I'm pointing at is also connected to the linkage that goes to the top of the carb to work the choke flap now even though they gave us this arm to watch so that we can see how the choke lever is responding to the position of the choke and throttle lever on The Handlebar I think it'd be a better idea to take off the filter base and replace all the bolts to get a better view of it that way we should be able to get a better View and find out why it's not working the way it should be also be aware that there's an emissions breather hose connected to the air filter base so you might have to disconnect it first before taking the base off and of course you'll have to reconnect this hose when you put the base back on otherwise you could damage the engine as unfiltered air will be able to make it past the filter now with the air filter base out of the way you can now see exactly how the choke flap is supposed to work as a lifts up on this tab you can see what kind of range this part of the system is supposed to have that means more than likely the issue has to be with not this part but the pivoting part in the lower part of this complex mechanism now the strange part is that when I move the lever to full choke the linkage system only moves this far and if I lift up on that tab it's now stuck as though the linkage is binding I guess I'll just have to find out where it's binding and see if I can fix it but there is just one small issue I'm not really sure how a working system is supposed to move in the first place after removing the bracket from the engine I don't think the issue is on the back side of the bracket instead I think the issue is at the bottom part of this system so it just Loosely put the bracket back into place and move the lever again and see how the lower parts are engaging with each other now this tab needs to move all the way up when the lever is in full choke but as you can see when I move the lever it's not doing that it stops right here now if you take a look a bit lower you can see this longer tab is making contact with this other one and if I had to guess I think it's here where our issue is at but I can't be sure until I find an example of a working system fortunately my personal Honda mower is the same type of system so I'm going to use it as a reference so what you're seeing is my Mower and if I move the choke lever to full choke you can see how the levers and tabs are supposed to interact with each other and it turns out I think the longer tab or the other part that makes contact with it might be the issue because on this one they seem to make contact and then slide against each other which is not happening on the other one so to make them slide past each other just a bit easier I'm going to bend the shorter piece so that it's parallel with the longer arm after that I'll then test it again and see if it's any better and then see what other adjustments I need to make now once I've made my adjustments I'll then move the choke lever and see if the longer tab will make the same type of contact act as the one on my mower so this time things have improved somewhat I'm now getting a lot more movement from the choke flap which is a step in the right direction now if I had to say how much is improved by I'd say that it's almost 50 percent as compared to about 35 percent which is what we started at so this time I'm going to loosen the cable's Anchor Point and adjust the cable just so I can get some extra movement this might be all that's needed but I'll make that call here in a bit so after adjusting the cable and the anchor and moving the lever again we've now gone from 50 movement to a much better 85 percent now even though it's improved that much the sad part is that we pretty much made all the adjustments we can within a reason so how we gonna get the last 15 percent now at this point I could start to make some extreme adjustments to the metal tabs but I'm pretty sure these tabs didn't get bent out of shape so I'm gonna try something else so as you can tell I'm going to spray lube on all the contact points on this bracket the reason why is because this part is very exposed to the elements so at some point they're going to need some help in fact I probably should have done this from the start but better late than never I guess so this was apparently exactly what it wanted with just a bit of spray lube the system is now working the way it's supposed to and as you can see the choke flap is now closing all the way to 100 that means we should be able to start this engine when cold without having to prime it with gasoline now that we know that the choke is working the way it's supposed to we can now install the filter base back onto the engine so this is when things can go very wrong and you'll need to be very careful sometimes but not every time the filter base might interfere with the choke system's levers and linkages or the flap itself that means once it's back into place you'll need to make sure it's still working like it should and if not you'll need to loosen the bolts and then adjust the position of the base and then tighten the bolts back down after it's back on and I know the flap is still moving like it should I'll then put the correct amount of oil back into the engine now you can put any oil you have back in it or you can follow the owner's Manual's recommendation on what kind and which viscosity But whichever oil you use just make sure it's clean I've heard of a few consumers using their old oil from their vehicles which I understand why but each mower only needs about two dollars worth of oil so I doubt it's going to break the bank the only reason to be that stingy with putting clean and new oil in a mower would be if you worked on and repaired a lot of mowers for a living so that two dollars worth of oil per mower will add up over a long period of time but if you're just servicing your own personal mower that shouldn't be an issue after adding just a bit more 100 gasoline with no ethanol to the fuel tank I think it's time to see if all that effort was worth it so it did take two pulls on the Rope to get it to start but at least we did it without needing to physically Prime the engine like we did earlier so I consider this a good repair now the self-propelled is a different story to change the belt on this particular mower it is not what I would call easy to do a lot of stuff has to be taken off and to be quite honest I am not looking forward to doing it and unfortunately since it takes so long to do that part I'm gonna have to film that part of the project on a different day and don't worry when you see what all has to be done you'll understand why besides I'm also waiting for the new belt to come in the mail so this works out great so what do you think about having all these linkages and moving parts for the throttle and choke system well how about this there's a reason why companies that make residential mowers no longer make them with throttle controls because they can be very complicated and also when they fail they can cause the engine to not start or worse yet cause the engine to break due to over revving so yes I can understand why they got rid of those systems and now you can only find them on select models because it turns out most consumers don't want to interact with their mowers and more so yes even though I don't like having to deal with sticking levers and linkages I still like this choke system I've had this system on my own personal mower for the last 10 years so I'm quite used to it but for some this might seem like the worst design ever and I can agree with them to some extent so my question is if you had to buy another lawnmower would you like it to have a bunch of levers on it like this one for throttle and speed or would you want one that was a lot less interactive basically you start it activate the self-propelled and then just mow with it thank you for watching I really do appreciate your time here please feel free to ask me any questions about this project or about your own projects and I hope to see you in the next video

Channel: Home Garage

Views: 116,558

Keywords: mower, honda, husqvarna, poulan, toro, troybilt, troy, craftsman, craftsmen, lawnmower, won't, start, will, not, starting, starts, run, running, runs, work, works, working, problem, fix, diy, grass, mow, yard, yardmachine, home, garage, inside, house, air, filter, spark, oil, gas, carb, carburetor, clean, rebuild, ultrasonic, bowl, jet, clogged, clog, clear, wheel, deck, blade, pull, rope, cap, line, bag, clooged, water, easy, simple, mountfield, snapper, self, propel, shakes, commercial, exmark, Tecumseh, transmission, drive, cub, cadet, Murray, lawn, lawn boy

Id: KXqzYJ6AKyg

Length: 13min 3sec (783 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 09 2023