Brush Cutter

I have a Mountfield mower with a Briggs & Stratton engine. This has a totally plastic carb (except for the jet and a spring). Third party replacement carbs are around ten quid (incl gaskets and postage) and this is the route I took last time the mower needed some service as it was much easier than trying to service the existing carb and only a few quid more expensive than buying a service kit.

I'm more interested in what you're trying to cut first.

With enough horsepower, you can just drive through it :-) It's when plant material refuses to be knocked over by your vehicle, you need to switch tools.

"MOWING TALL GRASS"

In my experience electric (battery or leaded), at a reasonable cost, is only suitable for tasks where you have first tamed the grass/meadow and are only using the tools to keep the tamed grass/meadow that way.

For overgrow grass/meadow you need petrol and/or something in the expensive price range that a professional would use.

I went Makita - from Lidl/Aldi - battery tools largely because of the range of tools, and they seem to stick with the same battery format.

The Makita tools are a bit nicer/quieter - can't say I've noticed a huge difference.

And I buy other not often used mains powered versions from other makes - a router and jigsaw for example.

Nice, but that is only grass...

If you want a real mower:

Agreed - I hired a brush cutter (£10) to level a vastly overgrown allotment in half a day. I now deal with the unruly bits with a bottom of range Makita 18V strimmer.

Yes, I found this for my Ryobi, replacement whole carb was ridiculously cheap.

Grass is by far the hardest work to mow. Even my tractor mounted flail mower will struggle with thickly growing grass but can sail through heavy brush and brambles without any effort at all. Grass tends to budle up into tough lumps and clogs almost any sort of mower if it's long and tough.

Yup dense grass does suck lots of power... Not sure a flail mower will lop off 3" saplings with that kind of ease though?

The top 'general' brands are:

Makita: very wide range, good selection of garden tools, some use 2x18V batteries rather than making you buy into their separate 40V system.

Dewalt: good range of DIY tools, perhaps slightly less wide range of garden tools. High power tools are on the (more expensive) 54V system, although their Flexvolt battery will also work in 18V tools.

Milwaukee: good for construction, not so good for garden

Bosch: good range of garden tools. I'm not clear on the battery situation

I'd probably think of Ryobi on a tier below those big players. One other thing is that most brands have their batteries as roughly a brick shape, while Ryobis have a tall stalk to the 18V battery. The stalk makes them compatible with their older NiMH/NiCd tools, but makes it hard to use a different brand tool with a Ryobi battery via an adapter. So if you're going to mix and match tools, better to have a different brand of battery. (their 40V battery is a more conventional brick, but not sure there's much of a 40V adapter ecosystem yet)

Theo