Weedeater 101 - The two most common reasons for failure to start.

hello dr. fix master here I'm gonna share with you a couple of neat ideas for keeping your weed eater running happy happily and smoothly there's just a couple of things that usually go wrong with these things and I'm going to go over those if all of a sudden your weed eater does not start a couple of things you want to check are the following one is diaphragm and your carburetor - I'll explain these two are the hoses in your gas tank if you look inside of your gas tank this is applies to almost any small engine you will see that there are a couple of hoses on the inside going in one of them is an outlet from the carburetor and one of them is an inlet from the carburetor and it's very important of course you want fuel has to get in there in order to be ignited and in the engine and so that your motor runs these hoses get old rather quickly they get brittle as a result of being exposed to the gasoline for a long period of time they only last for a year and a half before they get so brittle that they just break off quite often there's a filter that's mow maybe an inch long at the end of the hose providing just a little weight on that hose and it's it's very easy for that hose to break off in the place so that so the hose isn't even down in the gasoline anymore so one of the first things you should do if your weed eater won't start look into the gas tank shine a light down in there and make sure that your hoses are intact once that's checked and you see that that's good I've actually had that happen to me a couple of times so that's why I'm sharing it with you very common for that to go wrong so once that's out of the loop we move over to the carburetor I'm going to show you how to disassemble this thing very easy to do in this case this is a weed eater Featherlite plus butt the others are gonna be similar there's an air air cleaner on the top a couple of screws just take these out take this cover off give a little air filter element inside that can come off all right now we're looking inside the the air filter housing holder or whatever you want to call it and you will see that there are a couple of hex key screws in here so I'm just gonna stick this in here and unwind them once you get these two hex key screws out quite long they go all the way through the carburetor once you get these off you can remove the the air filter cover from the carburetor and take the carburetor off and you get to the diaphragm okay so those are how this filter cover can come off try to not to jar anything because there's washers and things that are better to keep in one place with that so I'm going to gently set that on the table here and now you have the carburetor which is free to come loose you can see that it's it's loose it's free to move around all you have to do is unplug these hoses right here one is the outlet ones the inlet when you pump that primer bulb it one hose it sucks fuel out of the tank and the other one that returns fuel back into the tank you want to pump that a few times to make sure you got fuel in there and to make sure that you know and you're starting it that you've got fuel present at the carburetor so now we're at that point I have sitting here on the table a duplicate of this and I'm going to use that to show you the rest of this which is what goes wrong in these over time why it causes problems in starting your weed eater and I'm gonna leave this one right where it is because I just replaced this today to take care of this problem which has shown up several times in the 12 to 15 years that I've owned this weed eater every once in a while it's gonna happen and the sad thing is that people tend to have a problem like that and they take their weed eater to the garbage dump when really all it is is a is a very cheap part that just needs to be replaced and it just takes a few minutes to do it what I like to do is because I've purchased another carburetor I'll build this one have it sitting on the shelf so that at the very moment when this one goes bad I can just swap them my weed eater still works I can spend as much time as I want on this to order the new diaphragm and I'm good to go so I'm going to zoom in on this take the camera off its stand zoom in on this and show you what it is about this setup that is the most error-prone what's the most likely thing to cause you to have trouble starting up your weed eater here's the carburetor up close on this side you have the diaphragm on this side you have the primer bulb once in a while those primer bulbs will go out and if there gets a crack in it or anything you push on it and a few little squirts all over you'll know when you need to fix that part most of the gaskets and things inside and the primer bulb have a longer lifespan than the worst culprit the weak link in the system which is the diaphragm so I'm going to show you right here the first thing you got a cover flip that down and the diaphragm is right underneath it there's usually a gasket underneath the diaphragm I can get you hands are shaking a little bit so what you see here is a gasket and a diaphragm so I'm gonna just peel this gasket away from the diaphragm you're gonna have to sort of remember it's gonna have to sort of remember the order so you can put it back together correctly but this this diaphragm is some kind of I'm not sure what kind of material it's made out of but this is what they look like and there's they're soft they're supposed to be soft and just like that what happens over time is what happens when they when they're brand-new this this material is very flexible and there's a there's a little valve down inside there you can see this if I can point out to you right down there and then right in the middle that thing will with the motion of the engine and the flow of the fuel will bounce in and out and it will push on this post on the diaphragm and and that motion will pump fuel out of the tank and into your into your carburetor so that your weed eater can run what happens over time is that this very soft flexible material becomes kind of caramelized and stiff with age and when it gets bad enough you'll start having trouble starting it eventually it won't start at all which is what I discovered today it's February I live in Arizona so I was just trimming around the edges of the front lawn and I couldn't get this thing started I knew instantly what it was so I swapped out my carburetor and off I went but this you can tell when you when you're pushing on this metal thing you can even hear it in the video it's crunchy these things get crunchy and when they get crunchy they don't work anymore it's a very cheap part so when you get a new one you'll see that these things are very soft and very flexible they're not crunchy at all when they're soft and flexible like that they do their job properly and it only takes about a year maybe a year and a half for fuel just sitting in these things for a long period of time it it it crunches them up it makes them stiff and they don't work anymore so don't go throwing your weed eater away after a year year and a half when it just quits running go get yourself a diaphragm kit do this 5-minute repair put it back together in the same order and you're good to go I have put my carburetor back on put the cover back on and I'm gonna give you just a couple of tips for starting weed eaters when you've taken care of the diaphragm issues mine this feather-light plus has been a little bit temperamental even with a brand new carburetor and I'll just share one trick sometimes if I come in here and I put this thing on it's full choke position and I I pull the starter a couple of three times and if I get nothing a lot of times what that does is it floods the engine and then you have to wait for a half an hour before it starts so my recommendation is to give it a couple three poles in the off position if you get nothing then increase the amount of choke you're giving it a little bit at a time so this one only has a couple of settings 1/2 and full so I just come up here to half pull it a few times if I get nothing then go to the full that's what I've had the most luck with I say that because just today when I put a new carburetor in here I went straight to full choke because that's what the other one required and I immediately flooded the engine I had to let it sit when I came back and tried it the next time I started on this side pulled it a few times with the new carburetor in there and I can tell it was just getting ready to start wanting to I was getting a couple of pops and so I tried the half setting and then it fired right up once I revved it a few times take the choke off and it should idle and this one was idling perfectly works really well the other thing that I think is important is if you have if you mix large batches of 40 to one mix gas to oil you can you can end up by the time you get through all that gas these things don't use that much gas but but by the time you get through all that gas your fuel is getting pretty old so I've you know because I've had trouble starting this weed eater on occasion and the age of your fuel is important I've I've given up on mixing my own fuel and I just buy these cans from from Lowe's they're pre-mixed you got to get make sure you get the kind with the right ratio that's for your machine but I like this because you know they use high octane gas it's easy it's because it's pretty mixed I'm I'm getting it in small batches so I know that the fuel I have isn't getting so old that it gums up my machine and and makes things not work and you know that fuel that gets gummy is is basically death to these diaphragms so just keep that in mind I'm just going to take this out just today I was trying to start it up and I was pulling and pulling and pulling and pulling and because of that diaphragm getting all caramelized and crunchy it just wasn't starting at all I swapped in a new diaphragm I had another carburetor just like this like I said and I put the new diaphragm in there or it had a new diaphragm in it and why it runs beautifully now so I'm going to demonstrate you push the primer bulb a couple times leave that choke off see how we do oh and a half joke coming back to half joke and leave the choke off I just started again just to demonstrate your diaphragms are good things healthy fixing

Channel: DoctorFixMaster

Views: 450,150

Keywords: Weedeater diaphragm starting problems fuel lines fail start carburetor

Id: IlCFHdSUuVU

Length: 15min 15sec (915 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 03 2018