History of Lawn Mower Engine Starters

Series Summary

Lawn mower engines are very versatile and efficient machines for maintaining beautiful lawns. However, there are few more frustrating things than a broken lawn mower starter or starter rope. Lawn mower repair, thankfully, does not have to be very difficult. In fact, with the advice of an expert, lawn mower repair can be quite easy. One video series cannot cover all lawn mower repair, but this series will show you how to replace the starter in your lawn mower and make small repairs to the lawn mower starter.

In this free video series learn how to repair lawn mower starters from lawn mower repair expert Dave Parke. Dave will demonstrate important lawn mower repair techniques such as removing the lawn mower starter clutch, installing a new clutch on a lawn mower, replacing a lawn mower starter rope, reattaching a lawn mower starter, and installing a lawn mower starter spring. Lawn mower repair does not have to be a headache, and hopefully this repair series will help you to easily repair your lawn mower.

Video Transcript

"Hi, Dave Parke here. I'm going to talk about the history of starters. These little engines are great. They're fantastic, they do all kinds of jobs for you. They actually, they have a wonderful history, they started with a power wheel that drove like a flexible flier sled and they had a pulley on them. They drove the back wheel and they dropped it on the ground and they pushed the guy along. And somebody looked at these little engines and said whoa, that's a cool deal. Let's put it on a edger or a lawn mower or something like that and that's how it started. But in order to get them to do what work, you have to start them and this is where it is first started is right here on the pull starter, your wrap around pull starter. They would wrap the rope around here, pull it and if it didn't start, they'd do it again. Not very efficient. Then, they came up with a recoil starter and what they did is they put a spring inside a casing attached to a pulley and put a rope around the pulley and when they pulled, it would automatically recoil itself so then you just pull it again. A lot easier. Now today, they've got a new kind of starter, its a pre-loaded double action starter where you pull the rope and the outside of the pulley turns but the inside of the pulley that engages the flywheel does not engage until a certain amount of tension is reached on the inner pulley and then it releases and you get a lot faster spin for a lot slower pull. They really haven't been perfected yet and they're a little hard to get used to, but they're pretty neat."