Day: August 14, 2013

The starter mechanism on my ‘debroussailleuse’ that is, and frankly, I was rather surprised that I managed to. Trying to re-coil the recoil spring was like trying to teach a wild snake to dance the tango – every time I relaxed my concentration and/or eased my grip on it, it would find the tiniest gap and then leap out at me at high speed and try to hit me in the eye. I found that it was impossible to rewind it using just my fingers – I needed a former of about the right diameter to wrap it around. This came in the unlikely guise of a short cast-off length of white plastic tube left over from my toilet installation 🙂

I managed to do it once and get it fitted back into the dome-shaped plastic cover that houses the pulley but then couldn’t see how to connect it to the pulley itself to get the recoil action to work. By the time I’d worked that out and tried to carefully bend the inner end of the spring to get it into the slot on the starter cord pulley, the spring had managed to sense my weakness and took the first opportunity afforded to it to leap out of the housing like a demented jack-in-the-box and wrap itself in knots.

The answer I found was to cut an angled slot in the end of the plastic pipe that then automatically lined the end of the spring up with the connecting slot in the pulley once it was released from the pipe and pushed into the pulley housing. OK, easier said than done, but by this time I knew that I’d sussed it and it knew it was heading for defeat. My ‘piece de resistance’ was adding a short length of wire to the pull cord so when it was pulled out of the housing and joined to the pull cord handle, there was already a small amount of tension on it. By then the starter mechanism knew that it had been beaten by a worthy adversary and all fight went out of it. I was triumphant as I re-attached it to the machine and gave it its first few pulls. Perfect. Pity the ruddy machine wouldn’t then start, though 😐