This is kind of what I’m thinking. I’m a moderately strong guy, but gas-powered lawn mowers are a first-rate pain in the ass. (Especially used ones that someone else is willing to get rid of).
Even if you’re pulling the cord with enough strength, even if the choke is set right, even if the spark plug is still working, even if the fuel mix is right… sometimes the blasted thing still won’t start.
In fact, I don’t own a single gas-powered tool. The weed-eater, the pressure washer and the chainsaw are also electric.
Anyway, technique comes back to some other things people have mentioned, like movers. This is most obvious on things like couches that take two people. If your partner doesn’t know the right technique, that couch feels twice as heavy as it really is.
Or the old “she throws like a girl” criticism is not as much about arm strength as technique.
So I think the best advice is to do as much physical activity as you’re able to, building up both strength and technique as you go. And avoid gas-powered devices.
You’re not a wimp your arms are just a bit short. I’m 6’2" and can bench 300 lbs and if I am dealing with a stubborn machine I have about 4-6 quick sequential cord pulls in me before I burn out and need to take a break for a minute or two if I am doing it one armed while holding down the mover safety handle. It’s an awkward position and on some movers it takes a LOT of effort for that burst of pulling speed and it will quickly exhaust you, especially if you have been pushing the mover around a while.
It’s all about leverage. Here’s what you need to do.
Assuming your mower has a safety pull bar of some sort you have to hold down while pulling (which makes the job awkwardly positioned and 10X harder) if the unit is self propelled make sure the forward drive is not engaged. If your mower is not self propelled don’t worry about it.
See if there is a clip or bungee cord etc or something you can use to briefly hold down the safety pull bar without you needing to have your hand on it;. Make sure the mower is on a flat surface and not tilted or on any kind of an incline while doing this. With the pull bar secured go around to the pull area and position yourself so you can use both arms and put your lower body, hips and and torso into the pull as if you were pulling up a stubborn weed or root. You will have far more power and speed in this position and can repeat the pull with less effort.
Admittedly, I don’t always do real weights, because of a combination of that independent, not wanting help thing and not wanting to drop heavy weights on me or someone else. So, I’ll use cables or TRX or things like that for certain exercises, but strength training in general.
I also make use of things like ramps (when they’re available), pulleys (when they’re available), and dollies (or other things with wheels).
Most gas lawn mowers have pointless ignition now. Strange as it seems, that last 6 " of pull rope is the key.
Blah blah blah …
Make sure you are pulling it all the way to the end of the cord.
A near perfect tune and good gas & compression do not always need that but let stuff get the slightest bit out of perfection and you need that last bit.
Also, you may need to position the piston before pulling by slowly pulling until you feel the compression and reset the cord and then pull. Other engines will start better if you do the full pull from just after the compression. Experiment and remember what works.
Cool engines needs X
Warm engine needs Y
Different machine, need to learn all over again.
Sometimes, especially with the grip safety, it works to pull the cord and push the mower away at the same time to increase both pull speed & length of pull when you are marginal on the oomph meter.
Quality of the fuel makes a difference. Avoid Ethanol fuel as much as you can. It is worth the effort to find straight gas for small engines like a lawn mower that sits a lot. IMO. YMMV
The thing is, although some people are naturally more coordinated than others, coordination and proprioception are skills that can be learned by anyone in good health. You may not be up to doing parkour moves off of tall buildings but you can certainly learn techniques to build coordination. One of the best tools to learn coordination is inexpensive, portable, and may be used in private so that you don’t have people watching you while you learn: the jump rope. Not only is it a great coordination tool but it is a good warmup and general aerobic fitness tool; ten good minutes jumping rope is roughly twice the aerobic benefit of running at a jog pace on flat ground or a treadmill, and also has the benefit of providing a controlled impact exercise that strengthens the knee and ankle joints. You can purchase a good speed rope (laminated wire rope with swivel bearings) that will last for years of daily use aside from replacing the wire when the lamination wears through. Other dynamic target skills like shadow boxing or juggling can also develop coordination (and yes, you can learn to juggle if you spend the time and exercise patience) but jump rope probably offers the greatest benefits for time spent.
Yoga and Pilates are both good exercises for strengthening certain muscles and developing kinesiological sense as well as significantly enhanced flexibility, but there aren’t a lot of dynamic movements in yoga or Pilates. Pilates is largely a prehab/rehab set of exercises specifically intended to strengthen the lumbar muscles and improve flexibility of the hip joints; yoga (depending on style) is more of a whole body exercise but performed in static holds and slow transitions.
To develop the explosive power and conditioning for something like starting a pull motor or lifting heavy objects, more dynamic exercises that recruit and develop Type IIA and IIB muscle fibers. Again, suspended body weight, kettlebells, or even plain old unaided bodyweight plyometrics like burpees and jumps are all good for this. Olympic weight lifting would work, too, but involves a lot of equipment that most non-athletes have neither the space nor budget to keep at home, and can be intimidating to learn and use in a public gymnasium. A TRX/rings or kettlebell, on the other hand, can be stored in a closet, and bodyweight doesn’t require anything more than an open, reasonably soft (i.e. not concrete or tile floor) space.
In general I would agree with this prohibition. However, I have seen safety shields and guards which practically prevent using the device as intended, or are designed in a way that makes them only useable by someone with a certain reach or grip strength. I would modify your caution by saying that if you do elect to bypass a safety feature, sit down and really figure out what hazard the feature is intended to mitigate and whether you can avoid that problem procedurally without putting yourself at risk for a single second of inattention or some abnormal behavior of the device, (e.g. twisting under torque). Safety features are there for a reason, but sometimes that reason is that the subaverage user can’t be trusted to not put his hand through a band saw, causing the lawyers to mandate a safety guard that makes it useless as a band saw.
Someone may have said this, I didn’t read the long posts, but make sure you’re not yanking it from it’s resting point and pulling it like you’re trying to rip the handle off. That’s just going to make you tired.
Pull it just a little bit, about an inch or two and you’ll feel it ‘catch’, that’s where you start pulling it from. Just a nice smooth hard pull from there. If you pull if from where it’s normally sitting, when it gets to that ‘catch’, it’ll sort of jerk back a bit and wear you out. I find it’s much easier to just start it there. That’s the point at which it’s spinning the engine.
Also, as others have said. Take it in this Spring and get it tuned up. Just having some clean oil, a new plug and the carb cleaned out (and hopefully it still has good compression) could mean the difference between pulling the cord 15 times and hoping it starts and having it start halfway into your first pull while you’re confident enough that’s it’s going to happen that you do it as you’re pushing it towards the grass.
Yes, there is something to be said about strength, but just about anyone cold start my lawnmower, easily and on one or two pulls.
Sure, since you might need to replace your air filter.
If your mower doesn’t start, there is always an actual physical reason. Go to your local mower shop for a tune up, Monstro, and have them go over its maintenance with you. If you treat your mower right, it should easily start on the first pull and not require any great feat of strength or coordination.
If the choice is not starting the machine period there may be some need for accommodation. Yes it’s more hazardous if the machine is carelessly started on an incline but people (myself included) used old school lawn mowers without integrated safety pulls for decades and we did not burst into flames or get run over. Using a little common sense it’s perfectly safe to hold the pull down handle in place while you start the machine. Just make sure it’s on a flat, debris free surface and the drive (if self propelled ) is not engaged. If you’re not having to hold down the safety handle while pulling you can position yourself to be a lot more leverage advantaged for the pull
It may not be your strength, but your arm length. Short arms, short pull which can affect the speed of the pull. I had a stubborn to start lawnmower, and I added a short length of rope to the pull. When I did that, I had to kind of reposition myself relative to the mower, and use another piece of rope to hold the safety bar closed. It was as unsafe as heck, BUT I COULD START THE MOWER!
At the beginning of the next season, the mower needed more maintenance than I was willing to trouble myself with so I bought an electric mower.
Absolutely. In my single days and also in my first marriage, I really had to handle all of the tasks. And one of my jobs was very physical, and I was the only woman doing it.
Asking for help because you’re just not physically strong enough to do it is not a lot of fun. Paying for help? That is okay. That at least can leave the impression that maybe you could do it if you chose, or maybe that it’s really hard, so hard that there are people being paid to do it. But when you have to ask because that pipewrench on that pipe is just beyond you, and to have men not meanly but still knowingly laugh about it, well, it sucks.
I would just confront it head on, most of the time. “Is this a technique thing or a brute strength thing? Can I learn how to do this?” I’d ask whatever guy was helping me out. Most, when asked, would try to take the question seriously. And I’d also say, right up front, “You’re making that look easy and I know it wouldn’t be at all easy for me. Thank you.” For me, that made it better, to get it right out there and make it clear that I acknowledged what they were doing for me. Not a solution, but it was a way to make it clear that I knew that they were having to do, literally, the heavy lifting.
I don’t have a yard, so no lawn mowing, but my bugaboo is jar lids, particularly the wide-mouth ones. I have small hands and my grip strength is mediocre, so they can be really hard to open. Usually I have success after several frustrating minutes of alternative techniques, including running it under hot water and/or wedging a knife under the edge and twisting it to pop the seal. There’s only been one time I can recall where none of the techniques worked and I had to move to my last resort, which was bringing the jar with me somewhere and asking somebody else to open it. But it must be nice to just pick the thing up and twist it open.
Another further trick to go along with Joey P’s is if you pull the cord out to where you can feel the engine turning, but then pull it out slowly until it gets really hard to pull. If you can, keep pulling for another inch or so but then let it spool back in. Then give it a full strength pull.
What this does is position the engine just after the compression stroke, so you have a whole revolution and a half before you hit it again. That makes it way easier to get the engine spinning fast enough to start. Back in the days of kickstarters, that same trick was the only way daintier motorcyclists could get certain bikes started.
You primed it 3 times in the summer? You flooded it. Each pull of the handle dumped more fuel on the wet plugs. Not enough priming can be adjusted. Too much priming is bad.
You don’t have a girly arm. Michael Jordan couldn’t have started that mower. Might have ripped the cord off trying but it wasn’t going to start without pulling the plug and drying it or just waiting it out.
What you have is a girly upbringing. Nobody taught you how to start an engine that has a primer.
Warm air is less dense it takes less priming. Cold air is denser and takes more fuel.
Next time hit it once with the primer and pull it at least twice. If it doesn’t start then prime it again and pull it 3 times. Be aware that the primer may be dry after it’s been sitting for awhile. The first pump of it may not add any gas. You have to pay attention to the feel of it. If it’s a clear bulb you can actually see the gas in it.
Winter starting of a snow blower may take 3 primes to get it running. Always work your way up.
I’m not sure if it would work with your specific mower, but tilt the mower down with your left hand. That’ll bring the handle towards the ground and give you a longer pull. Also, I’m sure you could just have the little loop thing that holds the handle move a few inches down the bar. It should be trivial to get an eye bolt and put it anywhere you want.
Anyways, the reason I came back to this thread was because I was watching The Office and Dwight just said this.
The lawnmower issue may, as others have said, be a matter of technique. They can be persnickety things.
I haven’t run into much that I can’t do because of lack of strength – I can lift and carry 30# containers of kitty litter and 50# bags of dirt no problem (though sometimes my asthma kicks in…).
When I need to, I find workarounds. For example, when I bought an Ikea-like assemble-it-yourself piece of furniture, I couldn’t carry it up the stairs myself. So I opened the box in the back of my SUV, and carried *pieces *of the item up the stairs into my apartment. And then I put it together myself.
If I need help from someone, I ask. It’s ok. People ask for my help to do stuff, too.
It’s good to exercise to get stronger, but don’t get hung up on always doing things yourself.
When the guy came over to help, he primed it three more times (probably thought I’d forgotten to).
Guess what, Magiver? The lawnmower started after his first pull. Even though it had been primed a bajillion+3 times.
So forgive me for ignoring everything you’ve got to say about this situation. I know not to prime it too much. But I assure you that is not why the motor wouldn’t start.
I suggest, if you have an adjustable wrench (which everyone really should), remove the spark plug, take it to an auto supply store and spend three bucks for a matching new one. It’s probably as old as the mower itself and worn out.
