How To Add Wheels To A String Trimmer

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Trimmer Type

While curved-shaft cord trimmers may exist the best tool for some users, I discover that a straight-shaft tool is far easier to control and much more effective. Plus, you can become it under things like shrubs and small trees more easily than with a curved tool.

Spin Direction

The biggest thing I see people struggling with when they use a string trimmer is spin management. Only as a circular saw needs to squirt sawdust as it works, a trimmer needs to squirt debris from its cutting path. If your trimmer spins counter clockwise, it ejects material from the left side of the tool and cuts best with the correct side. And so if y'all're moving along a walk, curb, or depression argue, continue the correct side of your body closer to the work, which will position the caput of the tool and so it can cut and squirt to the left. If yous go the opposite mode, you'll eject material into the cutting path, and there's nowhere for information technology to go. It piles upwardly along your cut line, bogs downward the trimmer, and makes scalping (cut too much of the blades of grass) inevitable.

Cutting Techniques

Information technology seems similar trimming your grass evenly should be simple—just hover the string trimmer to a higher place the grass and the whirring strings will cut it to length. Simply this isn't the best approach, and in fact will atomic number 82 to some serious scalping.

To turn an unruly tool into a precision machine that gives the cut I want, I rely on a few important techniques. Before you brainstorm with them, it helps to understand one thing: The ends of the string are where the cutting power is. The faster and freer these movement, the easier backyard life is.

Tapering: I treat the lawn's edges in two ways: by tapering or edging. Forth a curb, retaining wall, contend, or tree, I similar to taper. This means that I hold the tool so the string strikes the grass at a slight bending.

The problem with not tapering, or holding the tool so the string is parallel to the ground, is that the entire diameter of the string has to cut a full swath of grass. One telltale sign that a person didn't taper is a channel of grass the trimmer clearly cut shorter than the mowed grass. On the other hand, when y'all pitch the string tips toward the object you're trimming confronting, you lot're cutting less grass and leaving a tight, tapered edge, and likewise blending the edge with the height of the mowed grass for a make clean await.

Edging: Where surfaces are essentially parallel—say, betwixt grass and driveway or walkway, I similar to edge. I turn the trimmer so the string is vertical. I then walk the tool into the cutting path and then that it can eject material where I merely cut.

Expect to pull up clay, rocks, and other debris doing this. In yards that oasis't been edged before, I don't try to cut a crisp edge all at in one case. Instead I'll cut more lawn each week until I "sneak upward" on the edge I want. Later that, maintaining information technology is a snap.

Scything: When up against an obstruction I tin can't easily walk along or working in alpine grass, I like to "scythe." This means bringing the tool into and out of the work in a shallow U motion. Overlapping the scythes evens out the cut.

Screeding: For grass and weeds growing in driveways, paths, and sidewalk cracks, it's fast and effective to do what I call screeding. Tip the tool so that the string tips are simply glancing off the pavement, then move into the weed's base of operations, cut flush to the hard surface. Just exist careful: Bending the tool too shallow and you lot're just eating string and not cutting finer. Too abrupt an angle and the string tin can't hit enough of the establish base to cut evenly.

Mark Clement is a home-improvement expert, licensed contractor, and host of the MyFixitUpLife prove.