... or how I ignored the Internet and saved $500.00.
So... new house, out in the country, 50 acres of pine, no grass, no weeds, no maintenance. Very nice. "Don't plant grass", everyone said, "you'll just have to cut it".
Sounded reasonable to me.
12 months later, the tired old phrase "nature abhors a vacuum" suddenly makes blinding sense. Faced with an empty void, nature fills it with spider webs and big ugly weeds. BIG ugly weeds, 5-6 feet typical and some well over my head.
I had done some chainsaw research on the Internet, and it nicely matched what my friends were telling me. Picked out a midrange Husqvarna saw and (assuming I don't cut my leg off) I should be happy with that for many years. So far so good.
The chainsaw seemed a bit drastic for most of the weeds (although I did feel a lot safer walking past the big Trifid-looking weeds with an idling chainsaw in hand) so I obviously needed something else, apparently a trimmer / brushcutter / clearing saw, whatever they were. To the Internet !!
While the chainsaw crowd seemed to be pretty reasonable and level headed the trimmer crowd turned out to be a pretty wild bunch. If the chainsaw forums were the Axiom boards, the trimmer/brushcutter forums were more like AVSForum on an SVS vs. EP600 day.
Once I sifted through all the noise, the message seemed pretty clear. Cheap units will fall apart if you use them on heavy stuff, cubic inches rule, driveshafts good cable drive bad, pay me now or pay me later. I *really* didn't want to pay another bunch of money for a trimmer but it seemed like cheaping out would be a big mistake
I looked at a bunch of trimmers and brushcutters -- a brushcutter is like an SUV, you get more money by giving it a different name -- and there seemed to be three categories. Good cable-drive trimmers ran for $150-200 but would probably self-destruct on my property, high quality high end trimmers ran in the $250-$350 range and would probably be OK but "weren't really intended for my kind of cutting", and "real" brushcutters in the $500+ range (all CDN) which needed fancy harnesses and couldn't be used within 50 feet of another living creature. That sucks.
The last place I visited was the local Stihl dealer. I had been thinking about something like the FS250, a 40cc high end brushcutter, but the sales guy was pushing me towards some newer, smaller units with 4-stroke ("4-mix") engines. "Trust me, torque is what matters in a brushcutter and you can't beat a 4-stroke for torque". It made sense, but I was still up over $500 so I went for a drive.
Cue the spinning stars and the tacky 70's TV dream sequence, all while driving in 107 degree weather (Dennis, if you are looking for your heat wave I found it). "Torque...", I was thinking... "Electric motors have torque..."
Went back to the old house and dug the old WeedEater electric weed-whacker out of the back of the garage. Out to the store and picked up a roll of high end "Diamond Titanium Supreme" trimmer line in the right size. Don't think it had any diamonds or titanium in it, but the edges (hex shaped line) were pretty sharp and I REALLY had to work hard to cut the line with a freshly sharpened Benchmade knive. The first few cuts didn't even SCRATCH the line, whereas the crappy discount line I used before pretty much gave up before the knife touched it.
Up to the new house. Two hundred feet of extension cord. Plug it in and give it some weeds...
Well, torque really does rule with brushcutters, even electric ones. I imagine the trimmer will die a spectacular and smoky death if I don't keep the duty cycle down, but it REALLY chewed through those weeds quickly.
Now my yard looks kinda normal again, and I don't have to worry about those Trifid-looking weeds eating my dogs (cue "Return of the Giant Hogweeds" off Nursery Cryme).
And I saved $500.00.
