This is how they get you

Jeremy 1: "The Man" 0


Way to stick it to The Man, Jeremy! I trust you did something courageous and wholly memorable.


I fixed my weed whacker!


So much for trust.


We can go ahead and add "Small Engine Repair" to my vast and growing list of skillz. But this one feels a little more substantial. Here's why.

Most weed whackers that you buy at a large, faceless automatonic corporate home improvement store are pretty cheap. This is great for the consumer, but not so much for the manufacturer, since they don't make a whole lot of money selling them. So what they do is they make them basically disposable by using cheap components and having no features on them designed to make them useful over the long haul. The idea is that once they start to degrade, you either take it to a "certified" repair shop or just give up and buy a new one long before you should have needed to. I was nearly at this point not long ago.

Toward the end of last summer, and into this spring, to put it delicately, my string trimmer started running like hot garbage. It would stall out when it was supposed to idle, the motor didn't run very fast at full throttle, and I'd often have to wait 10 seconds or more for the string to spin up fast enough to actually cut through grass. This is pathetic, not to mention a little embarrassing, since people would undoubtedly see me standing out in the yard waiting for my trimmer to wind up. I tried all the usual stuff...I changed the fuel filter, put new gas in the thing, cleaned up the spark chamber and the carburetor, all to no avail. Since I have plans for the trimmer beyond just trimming (I also have attachments for edging and light tilling), I thought I would need to buy a new identical trimmer, until I learned through the magic of the Internets that there are two screws on the motor to adjust the carburetor's fuel mixture, and that simply turning these would solve all of my problems.

Of course, since the fine folks at the String Trimmer company don't want me to know this, or be able to do this myself, they use a specialized tamper-proof type of screw that you can't turn with a screwdriver, and also recess them inside an aluminum casing so you can't turn them with a pair of pliers or socket wrench. Jerks. Since they're tamper-proof screws, and I wanted to tamper with them, I had to buy a specialized tool online. Well, it arrived yesterday, and within 10 minutes, I had my trimmer working as good as new.

Take that, String Trimmer company! Some other guy gets $3 for a tool, and you get nothing, since I don't have to buy a new trimmer!