Once you’re done, just squeeze the handle, and the mower will be rolling at the speed you were at when you stopped. Since the pump cuts the pressure when you release the clutch lever, you can stop to move debris or empty the bag without having to change any of the controls. Hate having to give a hand to your self-propelled mower when you reach a hill? There’s nothing to slip inside the Cruise Control transmission, and the steady supply of fluid pressure allows the mower to maintain the same speed at any grade.
Top speed is about 4 mph with infinite adjustment from a slow crawl along rough surfaces to full speed on even turf. Once set, the speed can be varied using the clutch lever going from stopped to the preset maximum. The orange shift lever lets you select from 9 preset maximum speeds.
It uses the same pump and motor combination used in professional riding lawn mower, but they’ve managed to package them into a unit that’s about the size as a baseball. Honda has solved these problems with their Cruise Control Hydrostatic Transmission. This can make mowing around hilly terrain challenging and requires the operator to reset all the controls after each stop. Self-propelled walk behind mowers have always been awkward to use because the drive system for the wheels uses gears or belts, making it difficult to adjust speed.
Bringing Hydrostatic Flexibility to Walk Behind Lawn Mowers It’s no wonder that nearly every commercial riding lawn mower and garden tractor on the market today uses a hydrostatic transmission. This is extremely useful in lawn mowers: the engine can be run at full speed all the time to drive the blades, while the pump output can be varied to turn the wheels at just the right speed. What does all that mean? Fluid pressure and thus speed is determined primarily by the angle of the swash plate. That means there’s no need to use a clutch to disengage the drive system.
Need to stop? If the swash plate is at an angle parallel to the fluid connections, the cylinders will pass between the outlet and inlet at the same distance and no pumping will occur. By increasing the swash plate angle, the cylinders will be farther from the outlet, pulling in more fluid, and closer to the input, pushing the fluid with more force into the motor. As the pump spins, the cylinders pass by the outlet of the hydraulic motor to draw in fluid, then past the inlet, where they push that fluid back into the motor. The cylinders inside the pump are connected to a swash plate, a metal disc that can change its angle. The engine is connected to a hydraulic cylinder pump. Instead of being driven by gears, belts or chains, a hydrostatic transmission uses fluid pressure to transfer engine power to the wheels using a combination of a hydraulic pump and a hydraulic motor. The Cruise Control Hydrostatic Transmission doesn’t need belts or chains to transfer power, and it makes setting and keeping a mowing speed easier than any self-propelled mower on the market. Release the lever and the blade clutch stops the blades, but the engine continues to run.Hydrostatic transmissions have long been favored in professional lawn equipment, but now Honda is bringing them to their HRX217HYA, HRX17HZA and HRC216HXA walk behind mowers. This engages the blade clutch and the blade starts to spin. On Honda mowers, there's a yellow button that must be pressed in, then a lever moved into position.
After the engine is started, you engage a blade control lever, usually a 2-step process. You can usually start the engine without holding any levers or controls in place. Blade Brake Clutch models feature a clutch device between the blade and engine. With the lever released and the flywheel brake engaged, it should be hard / impossible to pull the starter rope and make the engine turn. You have to pull back on the lever every time you want to restart the mower. When you let go of the lever, the engine's ignition is stopped and a brake is applied to the engine flywheel to make it stop spinning < 3 seconds. They require you to pull back on the blade control lever and hold it in position to start and run the mower. The blade is bolted directly the the engine if the engine is running, the blade is spinning. There are two kinds of mowers out there: (a) Flywheel brake (b) Blade Brake Clutch Flywheel Brake type mowers are the most common.