How to FIX a HONDA Harmony Lawn Mower that WON'T START after Sitting UNUSED for years

hello everyone i'm buckweeser welcome to another video with buck's small engine diy on youtube i'm sitting here with a honda lawnmower that's been around the block a few times it's the honda harmony 2 hr 216 and i learned from the owner of this machine the following i have an old honda push mower i'm trying to get running it hasn't been used in years and perhaps it's a lost cause but before tossing it i thought i'd have you take a look to see if you can get it to turn over and start up my brother-in-law and i tried getting it going with a new plug no luck we emptied the gas out of it and we're going to add new clean fuel as our next attempt but i'm just going to let you give it a try well i think you made the right choice because bringing these mowers back into service after sitting for a long time is our specialty so thanks for joining me on this project we're going to walk through the steps of getting an old mower back in service after it's been sitting for a long time so let's get started okay so let's take a closer look it looks a little dirty but not too bad all things considered we do have a good bit of oil built up here on the front of the mower and along the sides here which makes me think perhaps we've got an oil leak from somewhere i've added fuel and so that's good and i've opened the fuel valve so we should have fuel running to the carburetor pop open this air cleaner air filter looks a bit dirty but i don't think it's going to be a problem right now i see that this has a manual choke so it's part of the throttle cable and all the way forward we'll go ahead and close the choke plate probably can't see it in there a lot of times these are now automatic on these honda engines but this one is part of the throttle cable you actually have a throttle control here and of course the safety bar that you have to squeeze in order to run the machine i wanted to double check of course before attempting to start it that we have oil and there is oil in there and if we get it started i will probably go to the trouble of changing it because who knows how long that's been so i understand we got a new spark plug i can only guess and assume that it's the right one for what we're doing and we won't worry about that quite yet might just be this valve cover that's leaking oil because the bottom of this valve cover is pretty dirty that might be the source of our oil leak all right so here's my first step we need fuel we need spark we need compression so i'm going to do as my first test i'm going to shoot a little starting fluid right into the throat of the carburetor and we're going to attempt to start this machine if it starts and runs even for a few seconds on the starting fluid that will confirm to us that we have compression that our engine will run then we have spark because without spark it would not have ignited the starting fluid so let's get a little bit of this in there [Applause] [Music] okay i'll leave the cover off and put you back on the tripod here and we'll see see what we get on this early attempt at starting it squeeze the bar pull the string okay so that was very revealing and a very successful first attempt what did we get we got the engine to start on the second pull and it fired with that starting fluid as its fuel and then it died right so that first test confirmed for us what the problem is we're not getting fuel flow through this carburetor we've got spark we got compression but the carburetor is probably clogged up gunked up and if it sat for a long time as the owner has indicated there's probably no fuel flow through the carburetor because it's just gotten gummed up with old gas so i'm not going to go any further than i got to go straight to the carburetor all right and i'm going to show you how to do this we're going to turn off the fuel flow to the carburetor which is a convenient feature and we're going to take down this air cleaner assembly i've done this on other honda engines and i've got other videos about it and this one's a little different because of the manual throttle choke assembly which you don't really see on these honda engines anymore so let me get a couple of tools and we'll get started on opening up this carburetor to clean it out okay so a 10 millimeter socket will remove the uh uh bolts here this air cleaner bolt here bring him out first now these two hold up the carburetor and the air cleaner assembly and everything behind here and the frustration with some of these hondas is they have this housing around the air cleaner making it impossible to see what you're doing back there taking it down is no problem putting it back together could be a bit of a challenge so don't freak out if things fall but we're going to take out these two bolts that hold on the carburetor assembly see that guy there's one there's our second all right now it all comes down there's a breather hose that plugs into the back here so disconnect that and move him out of the way all right so we've got a couple of linkages and we got our fuel line which is under here he's really hard to see so maybe we'll leave him last another option we do have is to uh take down this whole front plate that holds the cables and stuff but maybe we don't need to go to that can get the carburetor out from here so we got some linkages there's the choke linkage this guy and then the throttle linkage which is a thick a wire and then a thin wire behind it and so we have to get that those linkages off and that can be a little bit of a challenge especially with this plate here i'm wondering if just this bolt right here will move it all out of our way for us let's give that a try yeah okay so now we got a little more flexibility here to take things off choke linkage comes off thin wire for the throttle thicker one for the throttle comes next good so now all that remains is our fuel line uh typically there's a clamp but i don't see one here so we're just gonna we can twist it and pull it off there we go all right the carburetor's down we also came with a spacer and another gasket so they come off but they're kind of stuck right now so let's just leave them there for now and we're going to take this over to the workbench and open it up okay up here on the workbench this carburetor is covered with dirt and stuff so i'm going to just use some carbon choke cleaner and clean off some of this it's built up dirt and debris [Music] since this plate and and spacer want to stay on there i'm going to leave them on there because if they're removed makes assembly again even harder and i don't know that i need to take them off they might come off on their own but we'll see all right so i'm just cleaning off some of this crud all right having done that i want to open up the bowl here at the bottom and we can open that bowl with a 10 millimeter socket and i've got a glass dish to see if i can collect the fuel that may come out as well as any contaminants that are already in there with it all right so this guy comes off at the bottom well it may not be old fuel this may be the clean fuel that we just added but i can see in the bottom of that dish a bunch of crud that has come out with that fuel that was probably already in this bowl and when you open up that bowl it doesn't look terrible but it does seem to be lined or coated with i don't know what you would call it but i'm going to take carburetor spray and clean this bowl out thoroughly you know because it's in this bowl where your gasoline sits waiting for the next time you need to use your machine so this gas and this bowl need to be a really clean surface i can also see some of that same crud on this post and up there's the jet and we'll see if we can try to get that out all right so let's clean out this as best we can i think my brush already was pretty dirty all right we'll set that aside now coming back to the carburetor let's take off this float by pulling out this pin to get some needle nose pliers to grab it with there we go and he's so hard coming out because it too has gotten gummed up with the varnish from old fuel so now we take out the float and with it comes the needle just fell out this meters the flow of fuel into the carburetor bowl we'll rinse those guys off give the float a shake up at your ear make sure it hasn't leaked and filled up with fuel that would keep it from floating all right okay so up in there is a jet and i see crud up in there too sure what that is this jet can come out with a screwdriver what is that crud well that's certainly going to clog up our now sometimes these are really stubborn you gotta find a screwdriver that's just the right size and i got it hope that plate did come off all right this guy's bowed out there we go so this guy comes out he's your main jet just a tiny little hole and you know what this spray is not going through it that hole is completely clogged so no fuel is coming up through this main jet because it's completely blocked off so we have to get a pin or something to fit through there this this pipe also has to be thoroughly cleaned and it's filled with lots of little holes all right let me get a pin this is actually a sewing a sewing needle and i'm going to use it poke through our there we go so it's cleaning that guy out now we can spray some all right just that much increases the possibility of our engine starting because now we're going to have fuel flow up through this carburetor so i want to do the same thing with this guy pass this pin through all these little holes don't want anything clogged up in there these two these really tiny holes up here you got to put on your your magnifiers your reading glasses to do this i've got these little brushes which we can sometimes use to clean this out and then we need to do the same in here another thing i want to show you is this phillips head screw down here also houses a jet and to get to him gonna remove this which is our low speed adjustment with him all the way there's another jet down under here and i want to be able to clean him out as well this is the low speed jet which is minorly adjustable but it's got you can only turn it this much i don't know if i can pull that cut cap off or not not going to force the issue but i'm going to shoot some spray down into there that's not much of an adjustment is it less than a quarter turn all right so these are the steps that we're taking to clean the carburetor all the fine passages through which fuel has to be able to flow and old few fuel has sat in there for so long gumming things up [Applause] an additional step that you could take and that i like to do sometimes is to put this through my ultrasonic cleaner but i want to see if perhaps you know most people don't have one of those so what if we just attempt to clean it like we're doing now put it back together and see if it will run for us i think we've done here together the main things that need to be done to clean out a carburetor i'm going to put it all back together again and then we'll go hang it up anew on the lawnmower turn the fuel on and see if it's willing to cooperate i have a feeling it's going to run just like supposed to all right are you still with me there's something about carburetor cleaning that just is boring and uninteresting there's not much i can do about it but it was necessary so we're ready to hang this up and i'm gonna show you how to do it if it takes us more than one try it's no big deal the difficulty with this is that you can't see what you're doing because of this air cleaner cover that gets in your way so what we want to do first is take our carburetor and make our connections so we'll do that in the reverse order of what we took them off throttle linkages thick one and then the thin wire goes beside it sometimes i got to grab it with a pair of needle nose pliers i hope i got it all right next we had a um choke linkage he goes in right there like that we're also going to connect our fuel line there's no clamp but i got a clamp here that might work it's not a big deal to be out to to not have the clamp but it's not under any pressure it's just the gravity flow into the carburetor all right there and my clamp's not even tight enough to do anything there's no point even using it there all right so we're just going to connect it like it was all right okay so there we go with that i want to uh take our two bolts this is the tricky part i think we can do it i'll pass my two long bolts through here and everything hangs on these two bolts [Applause] all right so then it goes through this plate [Music] we end up working half blind it's amazing isn't it the spacer see about getting them started and before i forget i got to get that breather hose plugged in all right i got him everything looks like it's coming together i just did one of these same honda engines yesterday on a pressure washer same deal cleaning up the carburetor same frustration and trying to hang it all up again working blind because you can't see what you're doing all right i think we're on now let's try that choke again that's better now it's working all right so we're all back together and fuel lines connected and won't put the air filter on just yet let's go ahead and open the fuel valve and fuel should be flowing into the carburetor and we're going to get ready to see if we can fire this guy up [Applause] okay let's see what we get here choke squeeze the lever pull the string all right it's working well we did it it went from not running at all not starting at all to starting up on the first pull and running i wouldn't say great but okay it's a mid 90s mower if i had to estimate correctly and uh it's still kicking i'll have to talk to uh the owner see if they want me to go ahead and change the oil and things like that um but you know it's better than having to go out to you know to home depot and spend three hundred dollars 350 on a new mower this can get the job done and uh it feels pretty good to take those steps of bringing it back into service hopefully it's of help to you and mosquitoes are coming out i want to thank you for watching your comments and questions in the discussion below is always appreciated thank you for watching the video and i'll see you next time bye bye

Channel: Buck's Small Engine DIY

Views: 28,325

Keywords: Honda Harmony, Honda lawn mower, mower won't start, how to start, how to fix

Id: VXXC7MmI0vg

Length: 27min 28sec (1648 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 04 2022