Getting Your Lawn Mower Running Again for Absolute Beginners!

in this video I'm going to be covering some basic reasons why your lawnmower might not be starting coming up right now hello everybody Rudy here from take a bath productions with another video today helping you save some money through videos demonstrating how to fix various things today I'm going to be working on this lawnmower right here next to me and I'm going to give you some basic reasons why it might not be starting this is a general video doesn't apply to any specific lawn mower these are reasons that could be across the board for any lawn mower alright let's get started okay the most obvious thing is to take the gas cap off and look in the fuel tank if the mower has been sitting for any length of time if the fuel doesn't smell right then you've got issues with the carburetor I've got several videos on my channel about that kind of stuff but we're not covering that particular type of problem today the next simplest problem is the spark plug go ahead and pull the boot off make sure you have spark you can get one of these checkers at Harbor Freight or anyplace like that eBay or probably your local hardware store has it all this does is verify that you have spark now this may be one of the simplest problems but it's probably not the most likely problem but let me go ahead and demonstrate we have spark all right well we have spark next thing you're probably going to want to check is the spark plug itself if it's foul-up nope this actually looks fine I don't know if you can tell there yeah looks good all right as you can see we've made our way over here to the carburetor one thing you can check real quick is the air filter this sounds like a stupid suggestion but I've seen people overfill there mowers a lot with oil and it'll come out of here where the breather is at and Soak the air filter full of oil and that'll keep it from starting so keep that in mind when you check your air filter just to make sure it's very fairly clean and not soaked with oil or gas now another thing that now this one is actually a common problem is check the fuel for water now if you think, well I didn't keep my gas can outside how can it be full of water the mowers been in the house well condensation can happen inside the gas tank or it can happen inside your gas can if the gas can gets left in the Sun it'll condensate in there and form water inside the fuel you don't have to have water in the fuel when you put it in there it can get in there on its own so the easiest way to check that is in this case this mower has a short fuel hose as you can see right here so I have to take the gas tank off or I could turn the mower up on its side but usually when you do that you get oil up in the carburetor and that kind of stuff you can do that turn it on its side just draining out the top that'll work but I'm going to go ahead and take the tank off here and then I'll come right back and drain it out I like to drain them into a glass jar that way you can see if it has been contaminated or not I'll be right back oh yeah yep there it is as you can see it's full of water clear as day is the gas up here and here's the water down here you've got a very clean line right there there's no question it's contaminated with water like crazy now if that happens it's still not going to run when you put it back take the gas tank out and make sure it's clean take an air compressor and blow it out if you can get it dry get all that water out of there and the other thing is the bowl it's still it's full of water on this particular mower this bowl bolts on from the bottom so I'm going to have to pull the carburetor out and then take the bowl physically off and dump the water out of it if you have a Briggs and Stratton older-style or a Tecumseh engine they usually have a little bolt or even a Honda a little bolt in the bottom you can undo the bolt and empty the bowl out from there and you don't have to take it all off of there but on this one I do ok so keep that in mind one other thing you can check this particular mower is got this primer ball but a lot of these newer mowers are auto choke check to make sure that the the spring that's on the muffler isn't broken and making the auto choke not work so look at it when it's cold look at the butterfly inside the carburetor make sure it's choked when it's not running that way you know if that's working or not ok I just wanted to show you a couple of things of what I was talking about with the auto choke this mower doesn't have it but I just wanted to show you where it's going to be there's a thing bolted here behind the muffler that's going to have a rod going across here that that works the choke and that's got a little spring mechanism here when it gets hot it moves and when it gets cold it moves back it's like a heat activated spring kind of that should be moving smoothly you can kind of move it by hand if it Genki and it doesn't move good then that's a problem and it needs to be probably replaced that's not real common but I have seen those go bad also if you don't have spark I did mention earlier on the first step you might not have a magneto problem you might have the wire going to the magneto shorted to ground so one thing you could do is is pull that wire and if the spark comes back to life then something is shorted this to ground even when it's not supposed to be so keep that in mind too okay about the only other thing that it could be other than the things I've addressed here is if you've hit something in the yard tree stump or a big rock or something like that and you can't get it started after that check the blade if it looks like a pretzel then you've probably broke the key and the flywheel and the flywheel has jumped out of time I've got a video on that on a Briggs & Stratton 6.5 engine you can look at that video and get an idea of what I'm talking about that video or that instance you'll have to pull the flywheel and get a new key and then retime the flywheel I'm not going to cover how to do that in this video this is just a basic troubleshooting video all right guys I hope these points have helped and if they have click on the thumbs up and subscribe to my channel I come out with videos like this as often as I can thanks for watching

Channel: Take a Bath Productions

Views: 367,579

Rating: 4.7560763 out of 5

Keywords: troubleshooting briggs and stratton won't start, lawn mower troubleshooting won't start, troubleshooting honda won't start, troubleshooting toro won't start, lawn mower won't start briggs and stratton, lawn mower won't start techumseh, lawn mower won't start honda, lawn mower doesn't start, lawn mower hard to start, lawn mower not starting, lawn mower quick fixes, lawn mower repair, lawn mower troubleshooting, lawn mower won t start, mower won t start, push mower won t start

Id: nE9pqD26Z5Y

Length: 7min 58sec (478 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 23 2017