Briggs and Stratton Starter Repair

Hi, Dave Parke here back in the shop and I want to show you the most popular Briggs and Stratton starter up until about three years ago when they decided to go with everybody else with the pawl cup starters. Starter clutch I showed you earlier, is really a great starter except when it isn't and that is going to be when you pull the starter and the engine starts and it goes ehhhh and it sounds almost exactly like that. I've gotten very good at that over the years and it will go ehhhh and either eat the spring or eat the rope or spit the rope out and it just won't work at all. It'll jam and freeze and that's not a good thing, but I want to show you how they work and how you can fix that. The best thing to do is to just completely replace the starter clutch and I'm going to show you how to take the starter clutch off and how to replace it and how these work. So the first thing you want to do is if you have a vertical engine, its going to look like this. The starter is going to be very similar to this and you take two or three screws out and take the starter off and you're going to see the starter clutch here. Now its going to feel tight when you turn it and that's because it was screaming. It was catching, there is a shaft that goes up the center of the starter clutch and it has to run free up inside there or it catches and will engage the starter pulley and destroy itself. So to take this off, there is two small quarter-inch screws that hold the screen on. And you take those off and then comes the fun part. You have to take the starter clutch off and that usually involves if you don't have impact wrenches like we do and a special tool, a length of rope to put down the spark plug hole and a large channel lock and I'll show you how to do that in a second.