Selfsufficientish.com

I'm not sure if this is the correct forum to place this in but here goes.
I've said in another post that I do a lot of garden maintainence and have recently I have been looking at buying a strimmer. I'm drawn towards the petrol combi strimmers, a power unit with various heads to attach for different jobs. Obviously the strimmer/brushcutter and then the hedge trimmer and maybe the long reach chain saw. However, visiting the shop I was amazed at the variety of attachments that are available. There are lawn edgers, power brushs , leaf blowers (funny google leaf blower evil and you'll come up with this sort of thing http://opiningonline.com/2009/10/24/i-h ... f-blowers/ and https://www.facebook.com/pages/Leaf-Blo ... 5422921190 ) and there is also a tiller attachment.
Now in my long winded way , what I'm asking is has anyone used one of these tillers and how much use are they. To my eyes they lack any weight and wouldn't do more than tickle the ground.


Pete

Hi Pete

I have tried these and they were rubbish. The fixing that holds the attachment on two Ryobi's I had both wore away in hours, meaning no drive.

I must say my feeling now is 4stroke or Electric for Garden tools, I just Hate two stroke, and the only these I use now is a 2 stroke chain saw if I really have too, but even then I just length it and bring it back to the house and use an Electric Chainsaw on the saw bench.

The tools I was looking at were the pro or semi pro jobbies from sthil, husqvarna or maybe honda. There're all pretty robust by all accounts but are expensive. I know what you mean about the 2 stroke things , I couldn't get my hedge cutter to start recently and have memories of my father struggling with an old 2 stroke rotovator he used to have. Working as I do electric isn't really an option so I 'm stuck with a petrol powered machine. It's really just for strimming work and hedge cutting, attachments such as the lawn edger just seem like overpriced gimmicks.The edger for the husqvarna for example is £289.99 including vat.
The tiller is £184.99 which seems a lot for something that I can't see working that well , but would be interested to hear if anyone had used one.


Pete

Just to update in case anyone is interested. I purchased the sthil combi model number KM 90R with a trimmer head and adjustable hedge cutter. It's a two stroke. The dealer also sold the four stroke Honda tools as well but advised me to go for the Sthil as apparently the Honda suffers from problems if it's used upside down. It may seem not that important but I have noticed that using the hedge cutter I do tend to turn the tool upside down every so often.
So far there have been no problems other than a snapped strap although that wasn't helped when I run over it with the mower. Ok it's early days but fine so far.
Recently I found a tiller head on e-bay, second hand but with little use and got it for a third of the price of a new one. I thought buy it , try it out and if it was no good stick it back on e-bay. I was , however , quite pleased with it. It doesn't whizz round very fast but works pretty good. Not a deep cut but definitely usable as a sort of powered hoe. The only thing I will say against it is that the guard that sits above the blades completely hides it from view . Not a problem on bare soil but if I use it as a powered hoe I could very easily chew up the wrong plants, so I may take the guard off and make sure I wear face or at least eye protection unless I could replace it with a Perspex guard.


Pete