I was born into a family that made due with what they had. And about ten years ago, I bought an inexpensive string trimmer (weed eater or what ever ya wanna call it) and I have been flogging the dammed thing ever since. It replaced a Weed Eater brand "Featherlite" which I got free from someone that owed me money and used it until it was totally worn out.
A Ryobi SS30, and I bought it partly because it had the ability to use attachments like the tiller I have. Except like most multi-use things, it does not do any one thing very well!
The line feed hasn't ever worked right, so every ten minutes or so I have to kill it, and loosen the nut on the end to feed the line out manually.
Why haven't I just ditched this piece of shit and gotten a higher end machine like an Echo, Husqvarna or Stihl? Because I keep telling myself it's no big deal... just needs some TLC...
Tonight I was out near dusk, it was still friggin hot and I was covered in sweat, grass clippings and had just stepped in the third fire ant mound...I shut it off AGAIN because the spool would not feed. I got that handled, and the recoil starter quit. Rope wasn't going back in.
I messed with it a bit, then got out the tools. Separated the shaft assembly from the power head, then tried to get at the recoil to find I had to remove the clutch assembly and didn't know how to do that...
Lucky for me, we have a friend that gave me two identical trimmers that quit on him. I had already scavanged parts from one of them, found it would fire but not stay running. I swapped the carburetor from mine to one of his and had it running. Now to put the shaft and trimmer head on this powerhead, and I will have a working (maybe?) trimmer tomorrow.
Is this a good thing? NO! I am just delaying the pain! I will still have a spool that won't feed..If I had a reliable trimmer I could do all this in about 40 minutes, it takes an hour or more because I always have to dick with the damn thing!
Sometimes, being able to tinker with things, and having the "make it work" mentality seems a curse.
Perhaps my older brother has it down right. He moved to Arizona many years ago, and has no lawn to mow. How hard is it to maintain some rocks and cactus? He has no idea the joy he has been missing...
That's all I have for now folks. :)
I know the frustration all too well. Thanks for sharing. I was mad at a 49cc weed wackerthat i worked on all day tore down to the engine. Yea them clutches are a pain to get off. Aside from the 50 different lil torx bit screws of various sizes. The clutch itself is also a torx bit but very small and the hole it rezides in is smaller than the 1/4" bits that i mostly use for torx and allen applications. Ugh so i found the closest allen screw driver i could find 2mm to small 3mm to big ugh flat tip maybe? Yep had to file a lil off the side of it to get it to bite but i did get it. Oh yea it is counter clock wise thank God. Any way got all the plastics off the tank off the coil off cleaned up the coil and flywheel with some sand paper. Took the carb apart blew threw all the orfices to assure flow. Put the engine all back together then thought hey why does this flywheel spin so easy? Low compression? Took the head bolts lose and the one closest to exhaust just fell out. Aluminum head aluminum block iron bolt u do the math she was takn some heat and melted the threads. So i tapped a larger hole bolted the head back on. And turned the flywheel. Seemed much better. So i put it all back together and wala nothing. I yanked and yanked and yanked on that darn thing till my arm felt like it was going to fall off. Came inside and googled I HATE WEED WACKERS. Thats when I found this blog.
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