Strimmers

Thanks for sharing

 Posted by Mark on Thursday, 11 June 2015

 

The other day I dug out our petrol driven strimmer which had not seen action for many years, as Paul our gardener used to do such things and used his own. With some fresh fuel it fired up fairly easily which was a start. However it was at this point that I discovered that the gearbox at the cutting end had seized solid!

So I removed the gearbox and with liberal amounts of the magic WD40 I tried to free it up. I tried all the various technical processes that I could think of and ended up with it in the vice and hitting it with a hammer! But still it would not budge!

Nothing for it I thought but to try and order a replacement on line, but no luck there, no one seemed to carry parts for the expensive strimmer we bought from Ernest Does about twenty years ago! As we had to go into Kirkwall to sort out the details on the kitchen design I decided to take the seized gearbox around and see if anyone could help. Initially I had no luck and started to look at replacement strimmers, a similar one would cost about £300 so I kept looking !

We went into Orkney Tool Hire as they had been very helpful the other day about another issue. At first they tried to look for a replacement part but this might take some time then they asked if I had the gearbox with me, which I did. They suggested that as the thing was no good as it stood then there was nothing to be lost if they tried to free it up and would I like them to try? Nothing to lose I thought but I honestly thought the thing was seized beyond hope, after all the last time it was used was probably 15 years ago, still nothing to lose.

Twenty minutes later the gearbox was fixed and spinning like a good ‘un, ( I must have weakened it )  we parted with £25 and went home to try it.

Now the previous evening on the BBC’s Springwatch they were expounding on the benefits to wildlife of keeping a patch of nettles in your garden which reminded me that we have a small forest of nettles out the front that needed to ‘massaged’ with the newly fixed strimmer. It worked brilliantly and we both spent an enjoyable couple of hours destroying the said nettles and revealing parts of our garden that have not seen the light of day for many years. Anna enjoyed having a go as well, most satisfying! Thank you Springwatch !

Staying on the subject of nature, a whale beached itself yesterday and several people went down to the beach to help it, by late evening when the tide had turned they had got it back in the water and eventually it swam out to sea.

 

Thanks for sharing