How to Fix a Lawnmower Pull Cord

Welcome to Tech Tips. Today we’re rebuilding a recoil. Nothing is more frustrating than going outside to snow blow the driveway and ending up with a recoil in your hand. Here’s AMSOIL’s Patricia Stoll to show you how to rebuild it.

If you have a small engine with a recoil, chances are some day it is going to break, just like my snow blower did. And it’s usually when you need it the most. Today we’re going to go through how easy it is to fix it yourself at home. First thing we need to do is remove the recoil from the engine.

Your recoil is going to be held into place with three to five bolts. Mine has three. I removed the recoil from the engine, and I’ve also removed the old broken rope from the recoil. Now, there really are a lot of ways that you can fix the broken rope on your recoil, but I think by far this is the easiest way.

It’s a lot less measuring, a lot less math. And that’s great. So take your old rope. Measure it.

Make sure you add about 2 inches on this end for the knot, and make sure you add another 2 inches on the other end for the knot by the handle and any extra where it may have broken. Now, mine broke very close to the handle, and that’s easy if you want to use the same existing old rope. I don’t. It’s not the best quality nylon rope, and nylon can tend to fray.

I have a stronger nylon rope in my garage that I’m going to use instead. It’s a little bit more durable, and I’ve already precut it to the 5 feet that I’ve measured against my old rope. Make sure when you cut your new rope that you take a lighter and just burn the ends. That will help you seal up all those fibers so when you insert it into the holes it will feed a lot easier.

The first thing you want to do is take the old rope out of the handle and feed your rope into the handle and make a simple knot. You want to make sure it’s a nice tight knot. Pull it back through the handle. In doing so, you’re going to actually tighten up that knot.

The next thing you’re going to do is load the spring on your recoil. You can turn the recoil in either direction, but you’ll see when I turn it in this direction that the engagement lugs come out. Engagement lugs are actually what connect the recoil to the engine, so you know that this is a good indication you’re turning it in the right direction. Now, make sure you’re putting enough pressure on that wheel because it can fly back, and you might end up with a bloody knuckle.

So we’re going to just keep winding it, keeping pressure on that wheel. Don’t forget to do that. So now that I’ve got full tension on my spring, I’m going to locate the hole on the pulley, which is right there. I need to line that up with the outside hole.

So I’m going to slowly rewind, being careful not to let it go because I don’t want any bloody knuckles. And there you have it. My two holes are lined up. Now, you want to take your new cord, feed it through the hole.

Pull it through. Pull it through about a foot. Make sure your rope isn’t tangled at all and then slowly release the pressure on your recoil and let the recoil do the work for you. There you have it.

So now your handle is sitting in the recoil. You want to tie a knot on this end. Grab the handle. Start pulling it through, and you will see — my arms aren’t long enough, but as you pull it through it naturally locks it in place for you.

Now slowly let the cord back in, let it wind up and there you have it. So you’ve just fixed your recoil. Let’s say you get to this point and your rope is actually too long and you realize that I forgot to actually measure the rope first. You don’t have to go back and do everything over.

There’s an actual easy fix for this. So take a pen or marker. You want to make a mark right here where the rope and the recoil meet. That’s where your handle should be sitting.

Pull your cord out, making sure to keep tension on that recoil. Make a loose knot near the recoil. What that does is it allows you to have some room to make the new knot where it should be. Find that mark.

Make sure you add about an inch or two for the new knot. Make another new knot where it should be. Pull it back into your handle. Again, it’s going to make a nice tight fit and pull your cord back out, again keeping some pressure on that recoil so it doesn’t snap back and you don’t end up with bloody knuckles.

Pull your handle back through. And voila. You just fixed a cord that was too long. Now we can put our recoil back on the machine.

Now, to do that, you’re just going to reverse the process of when you took the recoil off the machine. Just make sure you put the handle in the same position as when you removed it. Once you do that, you’re good to go. Follow those simple steps and you can fix it yourself.

Thanks for watching. We’ll see you next time.