Self propelled mower - won't.

[JoeSpareBedroom]

8 year old Honda lawnmower just decided it wants to be pushed. What's the first thing to check? The cable, maybe?

[Don Phillipson]

Honda makes the engine, not the wheel transmission, which is the second thing you want to inspect. (#1 is to remove ignition wire from spark plug for safety.) We do not know whether yours has belt drive or mechanical drive. If you have no owner's manual, look for one on line and see what its Troubleshooting page says.

[Doug]

Male or female parts ?

[trader4]

I had a Honda Harmony and it too quit moving. It turned out to be the transmission, where a key bearing on the main shaft had failed. Bad news was that the price for a new one was $135. And while I do a lot of my own work, let me tell you, getting it out required removing a lot of small, specific parts, etc. I even had to go buy a new set of snap ring pliers because I did't have ones small enough. If you had to pay someone to do it, I would not be surprised for it to run up two hours in labor. In the end, given the cost and some uncertainty in getting it all back together correctly, I decided to buy a new mower. Found a brand new Sears on Ebay for $170.

The good news is the Sears uses a simple variable speed belt drive. It's now 5 years later and it's still running fine. The Sears also stopped moving a couple years ago. I removed two cover screws above the belt and found that the end of the tensioning spring had broken. One cable tie and 5 mins later she was going again. The Sears has more power and will go through taller grass. On the other hand, the Honda did the best job of mulching I have seen and it also left the grass with a finer cut. But given the price premium for the Honda versus their crappy tranny design, I',m not about to buy one again.

[Stormin Mormon]

My old Toro had a drive belt, under there some where.

Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus

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8 year old Honda lawnmower just decided it wants to be pushed. What's the first thing to check? The cable, maybe?

[Ed Pawlowski]

How do you know that on a Honda mower?

[JoeSpareBedroom]

It's a model HRT2162TDA. The dealer says that almost every one of them had complete "transmission failures". The entire assembly costs $70-something. It's almost the end of the mowing season, so I've got until late April to fix the thing, or turn it into a pile of useless parts. :-)

The user manual (sitting on the desk right in front of me) mentions NOTHING about this issue. Helm sells a shop manual for $35.

[trader4]

That's what happened to my Honda, similar model.

That's about half what the price for the tranny in mine was 5 years ago. I opted to not fix it. Sad though, the rest of the mower was in very good shape and would have gone a lot longer.

Would you expect a user manual to talk about the fact that you can expect "complete tranny failure"?

[clare]

The belt.

[clare]

There are mowers with Honda engines, and then there are HONDA mowers. Honda doesn't use tecumseh transmissions

[Stormin Mormon]

Esp. since they fail five years after the manual was written.

Christopher A. Young Learn more about Jesus

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Would you expect a user manual to talk about the fact that you can expect "complete tranny failure"?

[JoeSpareBedroom]

This is a distinct possibility because other than simply being an old belt, the self-propelled feature works for a few minutes and then dies, ***AND*** the problem coincided with mowing dry leaves. I wonder about the effect of the leaf dust on an already worn belt.

[Frank]

When mine was new and pushed hard on dry leaves I recall a rubber burning smell that concerned me. Been a couple of years with no problem but I try not to overwork the mower.