Not mine, not yet anyway.
Mark
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Not mine, not yet anyway.
Mark
OTOH, I often use my little 22 cc Echo trimmer with a brushcutter blade as a chainsaw. (Straight, solid shaft, of course.)
Works great as a po-boy chipper for brush piles, for thinning seedling poles and mowing anything from grass to brush. 8-tooth 10" blade slashes through tall weeds like water.
A big selling point, to me, is that you run it standing up, and can do that for many hours. Making those sorts of cut with a chainsaw is very dangerous, and physical torture. I'll pass, thanks.
Works great as a po-boy chipper for brush piles, for thinning seedling poles and mowing anything from grass to brush. 8-tooth 10" blade slashes through tall weeds like water.
A big selling point, to me, is that you run it standing up, and can do that for many hours. Making those sorts of cut with a chainsaw is very dangerous, and physical torture. I'll pass, thanks.
AuerX
constantly confused
How messy is a blade compared to the strings?
Getting really tired of being covered in weeds after trimming.
Glad you asked, and assume you will be on trying a blade.
I'm familiar with two types of 10" diam, 1" arbor blades- 8 and 80 tooth.
8-tooth has cutting edges like slasher blades, oriented radially, so annything they snag, no matter how small, will encounter a cutting edge. The cutters resemble small blades of a rotary mower, and are best suited to weeds and less than 1/2 inch woody stuff. Such a blade will slash through tall weeds faster than a scythe, with far lower rpm than you'd use with nylon line head. Easily sharpened with flat file.
80-tooth blade has cutters that resemble those on a handsaw. Works great for cutting 3" saplings and bigger woody stuff. Not really intended for small stringy stuff, but it will cut it. Cutting woody stuff, you need to cut with revs higher than with 8-tooth, mainly so it won't bog. With 80-tooth blade, I've done some severe pruning on taxus shrubbery, to take it waaaaay back from a walk. For sharpening, I hand them to someone with Foley/Belsaw grinder or such.
Cutting with either blade is far more energy-efficient than with nylon head. Typically at much lower rpm, dropping what you cut right there, not propelling it. Only disadvantage I've found is that blades don't "like" stone or metal. DAMHIKT
Keep spares. 8-tooth is more forgiving than 80 tooth.Your machine's shaft is critical for brushcutting. I wouldn't even think of using a tool with a flexible shaft in any sort of housing- it'd be real easy to destroy it. IOW, rigid straight shaft ONLY. Given that, my little 22 cc Echo is going strong at 35+ y.o. needing only a carb kit and a couple of clutch shoes.
