Its that time of year again when the garden needs doing weekly , there's nothing I hate more than an Unmanicured Lawn and my strimmer had finally given up the ghost and died on me , time to buy a new one. My husband and I discussed what we wanted and finally settled on a flymo Strimmer , because of the amount of storage space we have available to us we opted for the Flymo Mini Strimmer .This particular model has an automatic line feed system which is supposed to save time when feeding the strimmer line through the strimmer . We duly made our purchase online at amazon for the bargain price of just £17.99. (N.B. There are cheaper strimmers available on the market but Flymo is a household name and top quality for a small garden ).

The packaged arrived and I was dreading setting it up , but thankfully the process was relatively simple .

Inside the box was.

The upper shaft ( this is the handle with a switch lever and the cable attached )
The Lower shaft the strimmer guard and an instruction manual.

Setting it up

Take the upper and lower shaft firmly grip together and snap into place, then place the safety guard over the strimmer head making sure that you feed some of the nylon cutting line through the hole designed for the purpose on the guard head , push this in and when you hear a click you then screw the guard into place.
The Handle of the strimmer has a cable restraint recess which you feed a small amount through to hold the cable at the correct angle .This took literally 3 minutes to complete so all the worries of trouble were completely unfounded .

Using the Strimmer for the first time

This strimmer has a simple operation , you just push the button on the handle when you want to start it and again when you have finished .On using it for the first time I was amazed by how loud it was until I looked again at the manual and read 91 decibels ( is it just me or does that seem too loud ?)

The actual effectiveness of the strimmer is extremely good it trimmed the grass around the brick well in the garden and the bricked border with no problems at all , the automatic line feed feeds out just the right amount of line to start cutting , this is however very noisy as it clatters , I thought I had broken it but everything was fine , after you have had it running for a few minutes the line needs to be fed out more this is very time consuming as you have to wait for the motor to turn off completely then restart it and wait again for it to reach full speed before the line is fed out again , honestly its faster and a lot quieter doing it manually .

My Opinion

As a strimmer it does the job.Its very lightweight at just 2 kgs and therefore easy to maneuver around the garden without feeling you've just been through a gym workout its made by Flymo and comes with a guarantee and a phone number for the care line , best of all it's cheap !. However there are a few problems with it , the guard is fixed so you don't have the ability to adjust it to another position to make the cutting process simpler . ( my example : this means for any tight or awkward spaces you have to twist your hand like a contortionist or alternatively use shears , which defeats the whole object of the strimmer , the automatic line feed is time consuming and very noisy , but it is just as easy to manually feed the line yourself .

All in all I would rate this as 4 stars worth the price the only things letting it down are the sound levels , fixed guard and automatic feed .