Troubleshoot Lawn Tractor Mower Blades not Engaging

there's nothing more frustrating than a mower that won't mow so today i'm going to walk you through how to troubleshoot if your blades are not engaging on your lawn tractor i'm going to be demonstrating this troubleshooting on my simplicity regent here but it's really valid for any lawn tractor with the electric switch here to engage and disengage your deck [Music] all right what we're going to troubleshoot today is the switch your electric pto which is coming off your engine's crankshaft so we're going to start with the simplest component and the easiest thing to fix so your belt drive so here you can see this is the belt that connects the electric pto shiv to our our blade spindles so the first thing you want to do is grab this thing and see if it's loose so you can see i'm not able to spin this uh or move this belt freely that is a good thing that means it has good friction on the deck spindles and the drive pulley the drive shift that's on your electric pto all right so if you come down here to look at your belt drive and you're moving it and it's moving freely the first thing you want to do is make sure that it's on all of the shivs or pulleys you can see here this one is an idler pulley that's also a tensioner so the thing you want to do after you ensure that your belt routing is correct and it's on all of these shifts to make sure that your tensioner so you can see this is spring loaded here to make sure that has not broken so the springs can break um this pivot lever that it's on can break and this can be flopping around in the breeze there but if everything looks in order here and this belt is tight it's on all the shifts and nothing's dismounted we need to keep looking so the easiest way to test the electronic system of the the electric pto and the switch is to turn your key on and actuate your switch now it's hard to hear on video because the switch make noise makes noise but you can actually hear the electromagnet on the electric pto clicking when i pull this switch up i'm gonna get you closer here to see if you can hear that electromagnet actuating here so when you when you turn it on and off you should be able to hear both positions if you do not hear that electromagnet in your pto clicking on and off when you actuate this switch we're on to something so that device is very simple basically we're supplying 12 volts to a coil wires in there to provide current to magnetize the piece and that pto then locks up and delivers the crankshaft power to that driveshift otherwise when the magnet is off the two pieces become disconnected and that the crankshaft springs freely in that assembly so again we need to supply electrical power to that device to make it lock up that is done through this switch so now if we do not hear that clicking and actuating that's telling us that something in that circuit is bad it could be this switch it could be the wiring or it could be that electromagnet itself to start the troubleshooting of this circuit what you want to do is find the wire that's going to your pto down on the bottom here so on my simplicity region it's on the side here i've disconnected it so what you'll find is a connector like this with two wires in it what this is is a positive and negative 12 volt so we can put our tester on this to see if we're getting power down here or not so to troubleshoot this you're going to need a multimeter like i've got here or a test light um and so this this thing's a harbor freight special it was not very expensive at all so if you do not have one of these run to harbor freight i mean this is uh you need something like this to test it anyway we're looking for a 12 volt signal so we need to move our dial here to our dcv which is direct current voltage and we'll use the 20 scale since we're looking for 10. we'll turn this thing on set it off to the side here we'll grab our plug so you want the plug on the supply side so not the plug going attached to the pto you want the plug going back to the engine there anyway and stick one of the leads in each piece there so you're just looking for for contact with the conductor let that there and see we've got zero voltage right now next thing you want to do is turn your key on and actuate your pto switch now we come back to our multimeter and look at it and you can see we are getting negative 13.3 volts the only reason it's negative is because i put the black in what is really the positive and i've got the red and what's really the negative but it doesn't matter where it's telling us we've got voltage here so i do not have an issue if you're getting zero here i'd play with the leads to make sure they're getting good contact but if you got zero we need to keep looking and try to figure out what's going on if you do have power here but your pto is not clicking you do not hear that electromagnet actuating and you're not getting drive to your belt this has told you that your electric pto has failed so i've replaced those before it's not a it is a job you can do at home but if you don't feel comfortable doing that uh you can take it to a dealer but at least you know what the problem is if your electric pto is bad basically that is this assembly in here um it will be two it will be between the frame rails it will have the drive shiv attached to the bottom of it so to get that baby off what you need to do is remove your deck take the belt off there's a few bolts uh there's one bolt into the crankshaft and then you will need a puller to pull that off the crankshaft so it is not the simplest of tasks but uh i think there's probably other videos on the youtubes to to show you how to do that if you're not getting power down here to your electric pto we need to come up here lift up the hood and see that this is the bottom of our switch here so i've popped out the ignition switch just to allow easier access in here and viewing but this is the bottom of our pto engagement shift that's what turns on our deck blades and turns them off now if i follow the power here that it's getting see these red wires there is a a fuse so the first thing you want to do here is pull this fuse out and check to see if that's good or not i know mine is good so i'm just going to leave it in there but that's the first thing to check if you don't have power down there is this fuse if that fuse is good we need to come over here and test out our switch so if we're getting power to this switch but when we turn it on it's not getting down to the electric pto we know this switch is bad so to test this switch we need to pull off this connector and see if 12 volt power is getting here when we turn the ignition on and it's just the switch is broken and not allowing it to go down to the electric pto i found it easiest to pop this switch out so from underneath what you have to do is squeeze these tabs in and it'll just come up right through the the dash here all right what we need to do now is get this connector off this one is on there pretty tight so i found i gotta use a screwdriver here all right that was a stubborn plug i've never experienced uh one that tight before that that didn't have a a push pin or something that i was missing i've broken off my share of those but there's nothing on here that was that was uh grabbing on that i had to release it just was uh was on there quite tight so anyway um let's check this out and see if we're getting power here okay so i'm going to take my multimeter i've got it on 20 volts dc again i'm gonna take my red and i'm gonna guess that my red wire here is the the power so i'm going to test to see to make sure i'm getting 12 volts of power here even though it's not getting down to my pto so i'm going to put my my red lead into the conductor that has the red wire i'm gonna put that down in there and then i'm just gonna test the other ones uh with my black lead to see if there's a ground there and see if there's power here so you can see i'm not getting anything but my key is off so i'm going to turn my key to the run position and see if we get power this way so you can see i found that on the ground here i do indeed have power coming into my pto switch so if you find that you do not have power going down to your pto but you have power coming to your switch this switch is bad and you need to replace it if you do not have power coming to your switch you need to troubleshoot a wiring problem maybe it's a bad ground or something from your these wires feeding this switch that's not getting power here all right so replacing that switch if that was the problem um since we've already got it out that is a piece of cake we'll just connect it back up here there and pop it back down in the dash test it out we can hear our pto clicking so we're back in business if you were having this problem i do hope you found it to be this switch here on the dash that is by far the easiest fix for this issue if it was the the pto under there good luck it can be done it is kind of a pain in the butt and that piece is expensive you could look on ebay there's some some aftermarket options on there that are significantly cheaper than going through the original manufacturer simplicity or whoever you have that note obviously it's not going to be as high quality but then again the original one didn't last you all that long either did it so um good luck getting back to moen

Channel: The Lawn Engineer

Views: 25,846

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Id: 62EgwXVLB9c

Length: 12min 33sec (753 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 19 2021