It lives!

Ok - so the title of this post is similar to one posted less than a month ago.. bite me.

My mom's neighbor was cleaning out his house before he moved and thought I might be able to use a few items. Some of the items include a hedge trimmer, car ramps, a crappy ladder, and best of all - a Weed Eater brand gas powered trimmer. Score!

I know these things aren't that expensive, but I've always been to cheap to cough up the money for one. My electric trimmer has served me well but with this house that I'm in, hooking up all the extension cords just to trim along the fence has been a pain. I think I trimmed only two or three times total during the past summer.

This thing has definitely seen better days. It looks like he put some crappy head on it with no line feeding mechanism and I don't think it's EVER been cleaned. I couldn't hold it anywhere and not have a handful of grime on me. After cleaning the drive shaft with some steel wool and using some degreaser cleaner on the rest of it - it now looks almost new. Checked the spark plug and it was ok, lets just say I've seen worse.

Since I never owned anything with 2-stroke engine I had to go out and get some 2-stroke engine oil and an addional gas can to keep the gas/oil mix in. I found some manuals for it online and it expained the starting procedure. Seemed simple enough so I figured "let's fire this baby up!"

Switch to full choke - check!
Press Prime 6 times - check!
Hold down throttle trigger and pull starter cord up to 6 times in a row - on the 4th pull it fired...yes!

Put it to half choke and let it warm up for about 5-10 secs - seems to idle just fine and it didn't even die on me.. not too bad. Of course I was in the garage while testing it out.. so now the garage is a bit smokey and I smell like 2 stroke engine exhaust.... ahh - the smell of success.