I bought this Club Cadet shredder-chipper- vacuum with an HM80 Tecumseh, after getting it home I discovered it had no spark. Changed the sparkplug. No help. Ordered a new coil and installed no help. Ordered a new flywheel and flywheel keyway still no help. Set the coil air gap at 0.10. Also replaced the grounding wire that goes to the coil. I’m at a loss as to what is happening with this engine.
Help me please!!! Thanks Pappy88

 

Disconnect the grounding wire from coil and check for spark again.
Possible the grounding wire could be shorted to ground and killing spark.

RR

 

Thanks for the quick reply. I forgot to add that to my post. I tried that with the old and new coil.

 

Could it be this is a points and condenser engine and the condenser is shot. Have a good one. Geo

 

geogrubb - could this engine HM80 serial 155537P with a DOM 4362R be a points and condenser engine

 

If you have two wires coming off the coil, it's points/condenser. One wire is ignition module = no points

 

Yes there is only one wire on the ignition module - also the crankshaft does not have a lobe on it to operate the points. Would it be possible that the new coil is bad, is there a way to test the new coil ??

 

Yeah. You can have a bad coil out of the box, but if you have good magnets on the flywheel and the coil mounted close (.010 is good) the problem is probably in grounding the spark plug for testing or just seeing it. Try it in the dark of a garage, etc.

Try starting it with the fuel to the carb shut off and spoon a little down the plug hole. Then with full throttle/no choke see if it will fire. If it does, spoon a little more primer down the plug hole and turn the gas back on to the carb. Then full throttle/half choke and see if it will take off for you.

 

Thanks - marbobj your idea worked. I was trying to start this engine by spraying starter fluid into the carb. Now that I really learned something today, but still don’t understand why your method worked and mine did not?? Thanks again – pappy88

 

Starting fluid is relied on for a lot of starting because it's easy to use and it works a fair amount of the time. But in a semi flooded engine it can aggravate the flooded condition because it goes into the cylinder head already vaporized. That establishes a saturated air path to ground. This is more my take on it.

I use it in diesels, but never in gas engines. With gasoline already in the head, then the highly combustible ether on top of that I'm concerned it can be too much for the cylinder to take.

Glad you got it going. After the first start, it usually gets the gasoline residue burned out and starts better after that.