How to Test a Lawnmower Coil

how's it going eliminators today's video is gonna be how to test a coil on a riding lawnmower so let's get right into it so I got a Husqvarna 48 inch riding lawnmower here that came in it's got a kawasaki 18 horsepower v-twin it's the XP series now the guys was complaining that this thing didn't have any spark so the first thing you want to do now I have my coils removed here this is a v-twin so there's two first thing you want to do is come up to your little kill wires and you want to unplug them if you have a v-twin or a twin cylinder let's say an opposed if it's a single cylinder go ahead and unplug your kill wire and then turn your engine over and see if it starts or check for spark if you have spark that either means that you have a short to ground on your kill wire or you have a safety switch that's preventing your machine from creating spark now this model of engine is an FH 531 V the code on it is a BS o6 so your specs might be slightly different but on this one I'm just gonna go through how to test the coils on these because we've already determined them to be bad so for this you're gonna need to remove both of your coils or if it's a single cylinder just remove your one coil you're going to need some sort of multimeter that can test in ohms and you're going to be putting it to roughly around a 20 K you're also going to need the proper specs so what I did was I googled the FP 531 V engine code and I got a service manual and then in the service manual I downloaded this and I'll put it up on screen after when I'm doing these tests but you need the proper resistance tolerances so you can see here this is labeled from a B and C so a is your base your coil base B is your kill wire and C is your high tension lead that's your spark plug cap so over here in this little box you can see that it goes from C to a is going to be 2 to 18 K so that's 2,000 to 18,000 ohms of resistance then from C down here up to B it's going to be 10 to 30 K which is 10,000 to 30,000 ohms and then you can check a 2b and that's gonna be 2 to 18 thousand ohms as well so these tests are pretty simple all you have to do is set your multimeter to ohms of resistance and we're gonna be again using the 20k and then you're just gonna go and follow your picture here and you're gonna be testing your primary and your secondary windings on these coils so the first test we're gonna do is we're gonna go C to a so that's going to be from our high tension lead to our base so I have marked my coils here with just a piece of tape and I've marked them L and R for left and right and we can see here that from our high tension lead which is C to the base which is right here that's a C to a should be 2 to 18,000 ohms of resistance and if we look on our multimeter here we're getting about fifteen point six so that's fifteen thousand six hundred ohms of resistance so that's within spec so now on our left coil here we can move on and test a and B which is between our kill wire and our base so we'll just move this one from our high tension lead and we'll clip this onto our base here we're supposed to be getting two to 18,000 ohms of resistance and if we come over here and look we're not getting anything so this left coil here is garbage I'm going to keep it just to show the customer when it comes as things sad out in a farmer's field for about a year and a half he said and when he tried to start it nothing happened so it needs a battery all four tires are completely blown and don't hold air so he needs all four tires to have tubes put in them he needs a full carb clean and a fuel line and a carb kit could be a little pricey as well now he's looking at two coils as well so there's quite a bit of work that needs to be done and the cost just keeps going up unfortunately but we know that the left coil on the one winding checked out so we can just put this off to the side and show the customer after so now we can move on to the right side coil now I've already tested this and we're not getting any readings at all but I'll go through it again same process so we're gonna be checking c2a the high-tension lead to the base you guys can see I have it clipped on the base and it is clean metal I went in with just a wire brush and a little wire pipe cleaner to clean all of the connections and we can see here that we're supposed to be getting a reading of two to 18,000 ohms of resistance and again that's C to a we're getting nothing here though this coil is just completely bad and there's nothing left to do with that so these just have to be replaced so what that is there is called R and R which is remove and replace so these coils came off I tested them and they just have to be replaced there's nothing you could possibly do to modify these in any way and the big thing here before I go ahead and change the oil because it needs an oil change this oil looks like it's never been changed before I also have to do an oil filter a fuel filter fuel line full carburetor rebuild this thing is pretty hurtin because it's like I said it was sitting in a field for about a year and a half so I want to get spark out of the machine first then that's kind of like my baseline once I have spark out of the machine and I know that when I turn the key the engine turns over and the solenoid and the starter everything was good on that and then once I replaced the coils and I checked for spark then I'll know that there's spark the person who previously worked on this machine as well put in the wrong spark plugs this engine takes an RC j8y so I've ordered two of those plugs and I'm gonna have to put those in as well and I've ordered a whole bunch of other parts such as an air filter because he was running this with an old air filter and it's just bad you know and he said he wanted me to clean the carb but I don't want to do a carb clean and put an old dirty air filter on top of it so there's a pretty substantial list of parts that this thing needs and the cost keeps going up and up but at least the electrical diagnosis has now been done I've discovered the issue causing the no spark situation and we can go ahead and inform our customer of an approximate price that it's going to cost him factor in labor and tax and everything else and get back to them with how much it's going to cost them to get this machine running so just a quick little video on how to test a coil this basically goes for every machine you want to have the proper specs though because if you go and test a coil and it gives you a reading of like 8,000 ohms of resistance you don't really know what that means unless you have a proper spec so again go to Google now type your engine model number and you don't want to type in your model number for your riding mower or your push mower you want to type in the engine number because then that'll bring you up with a service manual for that specific engine and then you should find somewhere in that manual an electrical section and then you can go ahead and find your resistance specifications somewhere in there but again just a quick little video for today on how to test a coil if you guys enjoyed the video think about leaving me a thumbs up you can click here to subscribe and click over here to watch one of my previous videos I upload every single week so be sure to come on back check the channel out and as always guys thanks for watching [Music] [Applause]

Channel: Eliminator Performance

Views: 1,148,649

Keywords: How to test coil, test coil, ohms, resistance, electrical, riding lawn mower, kawasaki, fh531v, fh531v-bs06, eliminator performance, rcj8y, 21171-7034

Id: TlMqyNVNM6U

Length: 7min 23sec (443 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 08 2018