Outdoor Power Equipment (Lawn Mowers, Snow Blowers, Chain Saws and more) Discussions

I have a Honda HS928 snowblower with a manual drive transmission it works in 3rd and reverse but will not engage in 1st and 2nd.  Are there any adjustments that can made to fix this and if so what are they.  Thanks

The setting for the drive clutch (up near the handle levers) :
"1. Depress the drive clutch lever gradually and adjust so that the drive clutch lever stroke is 5.5" - 6" at the point where the pulley starts to move.

2. Adjust by loosening the clutch cable lock nut and turning teh adjusting nut. After the adjustment, start the engine and make sure that the belt is not rotating with the clutch disengaged"

Is this the track drive HS-80 or the wheeled version.  The two had very different transmissions.   lLook very closely at how the sub transmission shifts. It uses one gear for first and second, the second gear for 3rd and reverse. When you push the shifter all the way down it pushes a paddle to shift the sub transmission. When you pull it all the way up it pushes up another paddle when it hits reverse.

There was a design flaw in the "track" version of the HS-80. The reverse paddle (number 12 in the diagram) is a little farther away than is should have been.  These paddles need grease or they will wear away causing problems.  I only know this problem to exist on the track version so disregard all this if you have wheels and excuse me for wasting your time.

 

Underdog: "Is this the track drive HS-80 or the wheeled version.  The two had very different transmissions."

The TA and WA use the same controls, transmision, engine bed, and friction disk.  The external parts attached to the

engine bed are different to accomidate the crawlers.    The drawings for the transmission show the physical

parts as the same but the callouts have mistakes.  For example part 6 in both drawings is called out as used in the WA

but not in the TA.  The is nothing in the TA drawing to take it's place.  It has to be used in the TAor the machine

won't drive anywhere.  There's a drawing mistake.  If there is some change it might be gearing teeth but nothing that

would change adjustment settings that I can see.   The few I checked were the same in both.

What is different?

Can you adjust the size of the posted jpgs?  They blowout the formatting and make the thread hard to read.

Sorry about the blown out images, my monitor must have a different resolution. I don't have the manual in front of me but if my memory (what's left) serves me the track version has the potential to exert more torque to the drivetrain. So I thought that Honda (in anticipation of this added stress) had installed a torque limiter to the the track version and this resulted in a few other differences.  If the issue on this HS-80 involves a wheeled version I don't think this is relevant. If I am wrong don't hesitate to tell me. That's  the only way I will learn and I don't want to spread mis-information.  

I looked through the Boats.net exploded diagrams that were posted and I don't see any difference between the track and wheel version either.

I must have gotten that wrong.

There is something suspicious about these diagrams however.  If you look at the transmissions and compare the one for the track vs. the wheeled version  the exploded diagrams appear the same however the parts listing are different. There are extra transmission parts listed for the track machine.  A few of these include: 

21	23491-736-A00	SHAFT, SHIFT FORK (Honda Code 2141448).	$19.64	$15.71	1
22	23492-736-A00	FORK, SHIFT (Honda Code 2141455).	$7.04	$5.63	1
23	23494-736-000	SPRING, LEVER RETURN (Honda Code 1878289).	$3.32	$2.66

The three missing parts in the WA drawing are for shifting the transmission and without that the transmission is useless. The wheeled version has a cable that runs to that lever. It's a drawing callout mistake.

trouts2 wrote:

The Honda repair manual has a specific reference to "track only machines" 

Sorry that the photos are so small and hard to read:

Underdog,  you are right.  I was mistaken on the drawings and the different setup on the wheeled version.

From the drawings I thought the sub-transmission cable was used on both so had to run to the sub-transmission lever and because of that the parts I said were a drawing mistake was my mistake.

The WA does not use a sub-transmission cable to shift.  There is no sub-transmission cable shifting for the WA.  Thanks for the info and posting the manual page.  I just bought an HS70 and it does not have that cable.  

Hey folks, I found this forum because I have an HS-70 with the exact same problem as the original poster… first and second gear were inoperable while 3^rd and reverse worked just fine.

 

As it turned out my problem was slop in the shift lever. If you look at the post by underdog of the shifter schematic you will see a compression washer (#18 in the schematic) between the shift lever and the stud on which it mounts to.

 

 You can’t simply tighten the nut (#16) because it will just bottom out on the shoulder of the stud. I ended up installing a regular washer that fit over the shoulder of the stud and then installed the compression washer after that, so when the nut was tightend it simply added more compression to the compression washer and removed the slop but did not make it a ridged assembly.

 

In my first attempt to fix it I adjusted the cable which disengages the friction disk from the drive plate. This sort of worked, but if I adjusted it so the drive plate lifted high enough to release then the cable was to tight to allow the drive plate to press firmly against the friction disk once it was in gear… all I was doing was compensating for the slop in the shifter handle.

 

With the slop in the shifter handle removed the drive plate lifts about 1/8 inch off the friction disk, and when it’s in gear, the cable has no tension on it, so I know it’s not being held off the friction disk.

 

As to why it only affects 1^st and second gear and not 3^rd and reverse, the only reason I can see is because the drive plate on mine has groves worn into the drive plate where 1^st and second gear are located, since they are the gears which I use the most. They are not very deep but I can feel them when I run my finger along the drive plate, I would guess they are 10-15 thousands of an inch deep, which doesn’t sound like much but it was enough to cause the problem.

 

I hope this helps, and thanks to everyone else who posted, you gave me a good understanding of how the whole system works.

 

Mike