Heinous Retaliation Soon to Commence

The excitement here never lets up. Today I expect my new weed eater to arrive.

I know people call them “trimmers” because “Weed Eater” is a trademark, not a description, and Wikipedia says Weed Eater was swallowed by another company and turned into Husqvarna AB. I don’t care. I call them weed eaters.

Why am I buying a weed eater when I already have one? Simple. I bought the wrong one because of a lack of confidence.

I hate dealing with ethanol-tainted gas. Ethanol is a scam which hurts everyone except a few greedy farmers and politicians, and it ruins carburetors and other machine parts. I bought an electric weed eater in order to avoid dealing with carb varnish. I got an EGO trimmer, which uses a huge lithium battery.

The trimmer works well, but let’s face it: it’s not a 30-cc gas trimmer. Also, the batteries only run something like 20 minutes, and I have a big property. I can replace the battery as needed, but then what if I want to use the EGO hedge trimmer and the edger on the same day?

I decided to write off my loss and get an Echo trimmer. I ordered a monster. It’s the second-biggest one they make. It’s crazy powerful, and it weighs two pounds less than the EGO.

I also ordered blades for it. String trimmers are great, but once woody weeds get over 3/8″ thick, you have problems. The answer is to mount a circular saw blade on your trimmer. You can zip through limbs 3″ thick with a blade. It’s amazing. You can see people do it on Youtube.

The blades will fill a gap in my yard-machine armory. I have a hedge trimmer, and it’s okay for light trimming, but if you want to cut a hedge back one or two feet, it’s not good. When you drop down into a hedge’s lower regions, you run into thick limbs, and they don’t cooperate with hedge trimmers.

I have a number of hedges which I think are too high. I want to take some of them down two feet. I want to take others down a foot. This would be a nightmare with a hedge trimmer. I’m hoping the weed eater and blades will massacre the thick stems without much effort.

The people who used to own this place let the hedges rise up over the lower panes of the windows. That seems wrong to me. If you told your builder to put your windows at a certain height, presumably, you didn’t plan to block the panes and stare at the backs of your hedges all day. I want to see some of the land I paid for. My plan is to cut the hedges six inches below the window sills.

The blades should also be nice for getting rid of grapevines in the woods near the house. They’re so thick it’s hard to walk in some areas, and they also provide great cover for rattlesnakes to hide while you approach them.

Thanks to the Internet, I don’t have to buy a series of blades until I find the one that works. There are a number of people who have tested blades on Youtube. One guy actually put together a chart showing which blades did what best. What you want is a pair of Renegade blades. You want a 32-tooth blade and an 80-tooth blade.

I guess you could buy circular saw blades at Home Depot, but the ones modified for weed eaters have holes drilled in them to make them lighter.

Once I have the new weed eater set up, I’ll be able to use it for everything except trimming near things I don’t want to cut. They would destroy things a string would bounce off of. Because I still have the lithium weed eater, I suppose I can use it for string trimming and leave a blade on the new one.

I wondered if I should get the very meanest trimmer Echo made, but it was considerably more expensive, and it seemed like overkill, based on what I had gleaned from the web. People are getting very good results with trimmers smaller than the one I ordered.

I hear UPS outside. That guy must think I’m nuts. He’s here like 4 days a week. He’ll have to deal with it. I’m not going to drive half an hour so I can spend more in a real store and not get the exact product I need.

It will be nice having my hedges under control. I don’t want my house to look like the Addams mansion.