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Saturday, July 26, 2014

Splicing A Lawnmower Throttle Cable


Something I find interesting is adapting common hardware items to new, unorthodox uses in order to solve small problems. Just such a task cropped up recently while repairing an old lawnmower that had an inoperative throttle cable.

The cable was seized, among other defects. To make a long story short, I had to cut the cable's jacket in two in order to salvage it. That brought me up against the problem of splicing the 5mm diameter cable jacket back together. What turned out to be an ideal splicing sleeve was a 1 1/4" long, 1/4" diameter roll pin. Here's a view of the problem/solution.


The cable jacket is a very tough, stiff plastic material that's a snug force fit in the inner diameter of a 1/4" roll pin. Assembled, it all looks like this.


For good measure, I added some CA adhesive and let it wick into the jacket/roll-pin interface.

And here's the spliced cable re-installed and doing its job.


That's a good example of how ordinary hardware items can sometimes be put to good use in unorthodox fashion.

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