A trimmer with a weak motor can barely handle tender lawn grass, let alone real weeds. Working with it turns into a waste of time, but if you equip it with a steel cable instead of a fishing line, it instantly turns even small branches of bushes into mulch. Switching to a cable does not require complex modifications and will take a couple of minutes. Its installation will help both a weak trimmer and a tool with a broken coil.
Materials:
- steel cable up to 2 mm with thick cores;
- rubber bushing.
Installing the cable in the trimmer
The first step is to disassemble the reel and cut the cable to the required length.
It is equal to two distances from the center of the head to the trimmer protective casing. In the middle, the cable is folded and unraveled with two pliers to get a small loop.
A rubber bushing with a slightly larger internal diameter than the shaft on the trimmer is inserted into the formed loop. If there is no bushing, the loop can be wrapped with electrical tape, but this will be a short-term solution. After the cable has been loosened from the loop, you need to wind it back, pressing the sleeve.
For reliability, the sleeves diverging from it can be additionally protected from unwinding with knitting wire. It should be wound on a cable, but without fanaticism.
The cable is tucked into the base of the head, and the sleeve is placed on the trimmer motor shaft. After this, the cover is installed. The spool will not be required for this installation of the cable, so it should be put aside for storage.
Before using the trimmer, make sure that the ends of the cable do not catch the protective casing.
The described method of installing the cable is suitable for many trimmer models, but there are types of heads with different operating principles. They can also be transferred to a cable and are often even easier, since they imply rigid fixation of the fishing line. In this situation, you don't even need a bushing.
Equipped with a cable, the trimmer is capable of breaking strong plant stems and thin branches of overgrown shrubs into mulch. Of course, mowing with a cable is less safe than with a fishing line, so you need to use a protective mask and high boots. It is important that the cable has as thick a core as possible, then it will last longer. Its total thickness should not exceed 2-3 mm. It should be taken into account that the inertia of the cable is several times higher than that of the fishing line, so it cannot be installed in ordinary reels. In this case, their plastic antennae may break.
