Strimmers: self feeding reels ?

There is a vital little spring that is easily lost , if you are not aware of its presence on disassembly, or absense, on reassembly.

I have a B&D battery strimmer and have found the self-feed to be reliable. (But its batteries are getting old, again, and I'm not inclined to spend on replacements so I'm likely to be looking for a new strimmer soon.)

Are you sure that you’re loading the string the right way around? Easy to get it wrong. BTDTGTTS.

Tim

I did buy the complete assembly in order to avoid such snafus ... and it didn't seem to work :(

I believe so. The problem is I have to manually press the feed button and pull the cord every time it wears. Pulling on the cord does move the cassette the correct way (i.e. the way centrifugal force is acting).

And even if I were winding it wrong, the (pricey) pre wound cassettes also fail.

And this has been for the 3 strimmers I have previously owned.

is it te sort that needs a bang on teh ground to feed?

Your experience is my experience. "Auto-feed" never does. And yes, I too am careful to wind the spools correctly.

That's the sort that fits my Makita strimmer - and I've not been able to get it to work either.

The type that you tap on the ground to feed a bit, needs that spring to detend one notch on the ratchet drum

I have several strimmers. I had an old, small, B&D with autofeed and that worked until the bearings disintegrated.

I currently have a medium-sized Ryobi autofeed that does, most of the time, autofeed. It occasionally needs some help by pushing the buttons on the strimmer head and pulling the strimmer line but most of the time it's OK. Replacement spools are fairly cheap so I use them most of the time but I also rewind occasionally, either way seems to be OK.

Finally I have a big Exaond-It Ryobi strimmer with various heads, brush cutters and so on. It's a 'bang it on the ground' to feed strimmer, mostly it works but it's by far from 100% reliable. The strimmer line gets stuck and wedged tightly sometimes and also, of course, breaks right by the feed holes. It does basically work though.

We have several acres to maintain so I work my strimmers (and other hardware) fairly hard. No strimmer I have found is perfect and they do wear out fairly rapidly.

Sometimes the nature of the stuff you’re strimming can cause issues. As part of my volunteer work on our coastal path I use Stihl petrol strimmers a lot and bracken causes the line to jam frequently and actually weld the line to itself in spots inside the cassette.

Tim

Some only auto feed on the off to on transition. To get them to feed to a decent length you blip off to on multiple times.

Thanks - I'll give it a go next time.

Not that optimistic though. Even pressing it down manually and feeding the line through it's pretty stiff. A couple of weeks ago I had to pull the cassette apart as line had stuck to itself. Genuine Makita that came with the strimmer.

No. They are unrelaible at best...

Bracken seems specially designed to defeat most types of weed control. The stems contain lots of silica which makes it hard on strimmers.

Of the two I have (18V Makita single line, and Stihl straight shaft dual line trimmer powered from a Kombi head), both feed reliably. You do need to wind the line on in the right direction.

(I did have a Ryobi expand-it one before - the trimmer head did auto feed most of the time but was slightly temperamental - sometimes taking a couple of bumps on the ground. Getting the line pulled to tight into the reel - trapping it could also stop it working).

If you want to lay waste to thick matted coarse undergrowth, one of these is fantastic to use:

John, you mentioned the Oregon brush cutter blade - this seems slightly longer than the Stihl brush cutter blade but otherwise the same. Is there anything different about it?

Save yourself the heartache and buy a Bosch AFS 23-37 (non-auto-feed). Comes with a brush-cutter attachement, too. It's very good!