Riding mower cranks but won't start

hey everybody so this is uh a john deere riding lawn mower that i just picked up the other day it's an lx 255 it's got a 15 horsepower kohler engine in it and i don't know anything about riding mowers but this thing was offered at a price that i couldn't pass up somebody was offering it at 175 and i tucked them down to 125 with my expert negotiating skills and the issue was a no start and i love no starts because most of the time you can fix it for free it just needs a clean carburetor or something uh even if it needs some actual parts it's usually something like a spark plug that's pretty cheap so almost never passed up on no starts especially when they're in good condition and most guys just if it doesn't start they have no idea what to do with it they maybe spray a little bit of fuel in the in the intake and if that doesn't work then they give up and they sell it for almost nothing so didn't know what these things were worth but i knew it was worth way more than 120 bucks so i picked it up and um and i brought it home changed the oil and then i tried to crank it and it just cranked and cranked um took the spark plug out tested that to ground it was putting out sparked just fine so i knew the coil and the wires and the spark plug were all good um and it just didn't seem like it was getting fuel i put a little bit of fuel in the in the intake and it would start up and then it would die almost immediately so i took the carb out and i cleaned it put it back in still had the same problem it just was not getting fuel so i came over to this side and right here it's a little bit dark and i'm going to get a flashlight so right here is the fuel pump and i took that guy off and it's mechanical fuel pumps there's just a little arm right behind those two bolts right there that's how it comes off on both two bolts and when i took that out and moved that arm back and forth and it shot fuel through just fine so that wasn't the problem either fuel pump sends the fuel through this side back over to this side and it comes into the carburetor which is right there through this little tube um after i clean the carburetor like i said it still wasn't working which was strange because it was clearly not a it was clearly a fuel issue so i looked at this little goober on the bottom and it's some kind of solenoid so it unclips it's got a single wire connector here and let me put something to catch the fuel before i take this out this is just a piece of a cup that i cut the bottom off because i don't want fuel leaking all over the place um and i always wear gloves when i deal with fuel because it just stinks you get gasoline on your hands and it just you cannot get that smell out for hours the wife usually hates it so let me disconnect this guy real fast just a single little connector or power connector and then this will unscrew from the bottom of your carburetor bowl and you can see fuels leaking out so the float bowl had plenty of fuel in it okay and when i got this thing out so what i figured out by reading a little bit is that this guy is um is a backfire preventer and what it does is when you turn the key off this thing is not energized and so this little stopper at the end here if i can get it to focus this little stopper will go up all the way like it is right now and it will plug the main jet so no fuel will go under the carburetor and it immediately kills the fuel whenever the key is turned off so you don't get a little bit of dieseling and fuel buildup that ignites in the exhaust and causes a backfire so that's what this thing does and it seems like what's happened is it keeps getting stuck so right now this should be a little bit spongy i should be able to push it down and i can't and it's as simple to free up as just pushing on it and you can see that it's all gummy and that's not how it's supposed to be so what i'm going to try and do to fix it whoops i just broke that little guy off so that might fix it actually but i'm going to try something a little bit better than that and i'm going to put some wd-40 or something in there and maybe even something a little bit better to make sure it's permanently cleaned up and uh and then put it back in and that should do it that'll get it started i know that that'll get started because i already got it to work i did this a couple days ago and i thought it was fixed just by you know kind of working this thing a little bit until it started coming up and down freely but then it wouldn't start for me today so i figured this was the problem again he's having the same issues and sure enough it's all gummed up again so i'm gonna have to mess with this a little bit more i might put a little bit of anti-seize not sure yet i'll comment below when i figured out what works long term uh and worst case scenario i'll have to replace this stupid little part and it'll probably be 25 or something ridiculous for a fairly useless little solenoid that doesn't need to exist so anyway thanks a lot for watching and that's how i fixed this uh lx 255 by the way i didn't know what to charge for this thing i'm trying i started trying to sell it for 750 um nobody bit and i wanted to sell it really fast because it smells like gas and i don't want in my garage anymore uh so i lowered the price to 600 and i got a couple of hits uh somebody's coming to look at it tomorrow so pretty good margin on this one for so far i've spent zero dollars fixing it up um anyway that's uh that's been my first experience with riding mowers so uh hopefully you all can use that and talk to you later bye

Channel: Anything Mechanical

Views: 38,892

Rating: 4.5611815 out of 5

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Id: cIFuPH5ajSk

Length: 6min 32sec (392 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 20 2021