Articles: Lawn Mower Repair

A good spring tune-up on your briggs, kohler, honda or tecumseh should involve a oil change, a new sparkplug and draining any of last years gas out and replacing it with fresh fuel.Also it is a good idea to clean the carburetor bowl out, especially if the engine is over two years old, assuming you have a carb bowl type carburetor, which 90 percent of todays engines do.FRESH FUEL, GOOD SPARK AND CLEAN AIR FILTER and you should be on your way to a good start this spring,engine wise.If your 20 or 22 inch walmart special pushmower wont start or wont stay running after your tune-up, its time for a new carb, since briggs is putting plastic carbs on these without any adjustment,about a 21 to 23 dollar replacement item, my troubleshooting guide shows you how to replace, assuming you have a briggs engine, however if you have the sears special with the tecumseh engine, 9 times out of ten it will have some bowl type carb, thats almost neccessary to clean out every season.Actually the nut that holds the bowl on is part of the main jet,and will have two small pin holes that seem to stop up from season to season.I have actually spent ten minutes cleaning the bowl out on one, that the guy had been pulling on all day, ran like a new one, something he could have just as easily done.Check belts, blades, and pulleys for wear.Most of the time an uneven cutt by your mower is worn blades or a bad bearing in a pulley that turns the blades, one side cutts higher than the other.One way to check deck pulley bearings is to grasp the blade from underneath deck and try to move it up and down,there should be no play or very little play in blade,if however you can shake the blade up and down with a lot of play, you need to replace bearings or quill assembly as they are called,since running it this way will give you an uneven cutt, one side higher than the other or leaving a streak of grass in the middle.Batteries, if you get more than a years usuage out of the normal walmart or auto parts store mower batteries consider yourself lucky.One more note on batteries, if you have a electric clutch on your mower to engage the blades, you need a good battery for it to operate properly,you cant just jump the mower off ,have a dead battery and expect the electric clutch to work, the alternator on the small engine will not keep it engaged without a good hot battery.