Can YouTube and a cheap repair kit save a dying line trimmer?

“I should get that sorted,” I’d say to myself, but never did.

Things came to a head one sunny day when the trimmer just wouldn’t turn over. I tried my usual solution – brute force – and after a mighty heave on the starter cord, found myself sitting on my bum with a torn-off handle in my hand.

There’s no coming back from that place. I’d stuffed it. I had to admit defeat and get the thing repaired.

To the mechanic

I’ve always thought myself to be reasonably handy with tools, but woefully inept when it comes to all things involving motors. It’s a skillset that was missing from my house growing up, so I didn’t learn by osmosis. I’ve had to rely on mechanics to fix both my car and petrol-powered garden equipment.

The shop offered to fix my Stihl. The problem was the quote. It was a $250 repair while the same model was sitting on the shelf behind them, brand new, with a price tag of $300. They advised me to think carefully about what I was going to do – a repair probably wasn’t economically viable. Fair enough. I decided that $250 wasn’t viable at all.

What was wrong?

Well, the obvious thing was the starter handle was no longer connected to the machine, but the whole starting mechanism was apparently cooked. The shop also told me the carburettor was kaput. Admittedly, I didn’t even know what a carburettor does, but nodded knowingly and carried the dead weed eater out to my car. Then I got googling on my phone.

Firstly, I found out that a carburettor mixes air and fuel before the spark plug makes it explode. Secondly, I found a replacement (non-Stihl) part on the Dick Smith website for $31.40. That’s cheaper than $250!

What about the starter cord fix? YouTube videos showed it to be more niggly than I’d imagined. The mechanism has a coiled-up watch spring and attempting a repair looked problematic. Luckily, AliExpress had parts that simply replaced the whole back cover of the line trimmer, including the starter assembly for $15.

That priced the entire repair at less than $50. Now I just needed to do it.

I’ll just do it myself then!

If you’ve ordered things from AliExpress before, you know it takes a long time, so I was content to sit back and let my lawn edges run amok. That time waiting wasn’t spent idly. I watched video after video of people making my planned repair look simple.

Before long, my parcels arrived, and it turns out the repair was as simple as the videos promised. A couple of bolts here and there and it was a matter of removing the wrecked carburettor and replacing it with the new one. The hardest part was working the fuel lines into place, which required plenty of elbow grease. I even got in some extra practice when I noticed an important gasket left sitting on the workbench – and had to reassemble the whole thing again. I timed myself and the repair was done in about 45 minutes. That’s including the starter cord fix, which involved removing the old cover and bolting on the new one.

I’ve given the trimmer a new lease on life and can now deal with those edges that’ve run rampant. When things inevitably go wrong down the track with my weed eater, I’ll be brimming with confidence to tackle my own cheap repair again.

What did I learn?

Home repair of this nature is in no way new or groundbreaking (well it is for me), but it is a dying art. A busy lifestyle and the general design of many modern products means we either don’t prioritise, don’t have the time, or simply can’t repair certain things.

Luckily, things with motors haven’t changed much over time. A two-stroke line trimmer from 30 years ago is similar to the ones on the shelf today. And fixing them has always been relatively easy. You just need the tools and the know-how. YouTube and numerous websites bring the knowledge to the people, and you can always borrow the tools you don’t have.

The key thing here is that you should repair things when given the chance. If you come up against an expensive quote, don’t let that stop you. You might just find a workaround. A quick browse of the web saved me $200. And dedicating an hour of my time to the task not only fixed my machine, it also taught me a new skill. Most importantly, it diverted yet another product that was heading for the scrapheap.