5 Reasons to Take the Trimmer Guard OFF Your Weedeater

everybody i'm jason creel and this is the line care life today i'm going to share with you something that has actually become a controversial topic and i'm a little bit surprised by that but i'm going to talk about five reasons to take the guard off your trimmer now i'll give you a few reasons to keep it on but i'm a big proponent of taking the guard off the tremor and i'm going to tell you why i'm going to demonstrate a little bit today's video is sponsored by my friends at yard book if you're in the lawn care business and looking for a lawn care software i would strongly encourage you to consider yard book go to yardbook.com for a free account alright so let's go over the reasons to to keep the guard on first uh the number one reason obviously is for your protection if you want to if you're concerned about the debris flying and like i said it's a reality okay i'm not making it up i've been mowing grass for a long time and i can think of one or two instances where a stick flew up and i had my glasses on but the stick would still catch me and it might uh cut me just a little bit but those times are very rare and to me not not worth having the guard okay but that is the obviously the number one reason number two reason to keep the guard on is they may they say it may affect your manufacturer's warranty so if you're concerned about that then you might want to leave your guard off number three reason that i would say to leave the guard on is people encourage you this is arguments i get at least that it can put more strain on the engine of the trimmer and so you may cause some damage to your trip all right those are the reasons that i don't abide to and uh but they are realistic reasons but i want to share with you the other side of the coin and talked about reasons to take the guard off your trimmer and why i think it's not even a very hard decision for me all right number one reason to take the guard off your trimmer is to me so you can see what you're doing better okay the guard is in the way of my sight line particularly when i flip it upside down and i'm edging now again some people are going to say don't flip your trimmer upside down you you might uh do something with the fuel that might get into something and make it not run as good i i look at these things as a three to four hundred dollar if you get a nice and three or four hundred dollar piece of equipment that's used for productivity and to make you money if you're in the lawn care business i'm not necessarily concerned if i flip it upside down it may not last as long i mean yeah be great last long but it's about making money productivity being fast and that's even more in my own yard i want to be fast and efficient with it and the guard gets in the way so let me show you for instance if i'm edging this uh tree line right here edge of the grass line how the guard i don't have a guard on here when you have a guard the guard is right in my line of sight okay and it makes it difficult to see the the edge where you're trying to make it i'm not saying it's impossible i can do it but it it does block my sight so let me edge this and obviously without the guard i can see exactly what i'm doing [Music] oh [Music] yes so when i'm edging i'm not trying to get in the general vicinity of where the edge is i want to have an exact crisp edge i want to hold my my hand straight steady hand and make it nice and crisp and sometimes there might be some grass growing up in the flower bed i can kind of move this back and forth almost like an eraser okay and it's just a racing any grasses in the way but i need visibility when i do that i don't want my sight blocked by a guard now is it possible that when you do that that a rock or stick can fly up and hit you yes i'm mostly concerned about my eyes so i wear glasses but if it hits me in the head i i live to survive another day one thing you can do about that is when you're edging like that one the main thing you want to do is understand which way the rocks are going so the head is turning this way you need to understand it's most likely throwing the rocks uh in in that direction as you edge because the way the head's spinning so it's going to throw the debris the way the head spins so most of the rocks are going to go that way so you got to make sure there's not a window a person a car anything behind you yes occasionally stuff comes up but the other thing you do is you don't have to run it wide open when you're edging okay you can ease off the trigger a little bit where you're not less likely to just throw an absolute missile up hit you right in the head all right the second reason i want to encourage you to take the guard off is where i find it convenient again i'm coming from a perspective of efficiency making money trying to be as fast as i am as i can be and then doing a good job so i'm trying to fit the the trimmer head into tighter spaces so that might be behind an air conditioner it might be in a situation like this where you've got a bunch of landscaping and sometimes if if you have a guard there will be a space that you can't fit the trimmer head into because of the guard but if you if you take the guard off you might can get it behind that air conditioning system of course you don't pay attention to the wires and things like that because you don't have big bulky guard here it will fit in tighter spaces again that makes me more efficient it makes me uh more productive if i fit in a tighter speed i can see exactly where where i'm looking at without the guard being in the way this lines up with my view of productivity not neglecting safety but i think a responsible user and you may argue that having no guard is irresponsible i think if you know what you're doing and you take care with the weight and understand which way debris is going to be throwing and use some caution that a cautious operator with no guard is much safer than a an idiot with a guard okay so people that don't know what they're doing don't understand which way the debris is throwing can have a full shield on here and still break a window because they don't know what they're doing and they're not paying attention to what they're doing versus somebody that doesn't have a guard but pays attention and uses caution let me give you an illustration you think about driving cars and you get some car that's got all these safety awards and this is the safest car if you're in a wreck hey that's a great idea okay but what would you rather have a really safe driver in a car that didn't win a lot of awards or an idiot driver who's driving the safest car you know the idiot driver is probably still going to end up in more danger than a safe driver in a car that now i'm not you could say hey why not be the safe driver and the safe car well that's fine but as far as this goes it the to the safe driver the the guard on slows down my productivity and i think the risk of not having a guard or do not outweigh the rewards or taking the guard off all right the third reason i think you should remove the guard is let's talk about the warranty on your trimmer now i like husqvarna tremors i'm not saying it's the only good kind out there and i can talk to show you my trip in a minute but uh when they talk about the warranty on the trimmer i personally and it's not a knock on any of the companies but i don't have a whole lot of confidence in the warranty if this thing dies on me and i take it in there it seems often times now this isn't the case with lawn mowers i don't feel like but i have a hard time finding that they're gonna just honor the warranty okay it seems like what normally goes wrong with these tremors is yeah the shaft does not snap in two and i go in there and say hey i need a new trimmer the shaft broke it's too it's more likely some engine problems carburetor problems you know on the steels it's like the valves need adjusted things like that well most likely oh that's not going to be covered under warranty so i again i'm not so much worried about the warranty which i don't think is going to probably cover a lot of the issues i'm going to have with my trimmer and i don't find personally that by doing this that the tremor is going to last a lesser amount of time i feel like i i my tremors last good i flip them upside down i do think the fuel you run in them is important so either running non-ethanol gas in there or running some kind of fuel that has an oil stabilizer i use optio two-cycle oil that has a fuel stabilizer built in it i don't know if it's great or not but i seem to get good longevity out of my two cycle equipment not a lot of confidence in the warranty is my third reason to take the guard off all right the fourth reason and i've kind of hinted this already but ultimately i like to operate with a little bit longer line that the guard will allow me to have the guard would not allow me to have this length of line and if your trimmer box down because your line gets this long then i think you don't have a powerful enough trimmer just be honest with you but when i get this long and it starts clicking against the little cut off thing on the guard making all kind of racket until it cuts it down shorter that is annoying one i can't stand that sound two it's slowing down my productivity so like for instance i'm going to show you this hillside i'm going to do a little trimming here but this is a big area and i want to make big open wide passes and i'm trying to go fast and so it's like cutting with a 21 inch mower versus a 30 inch mower 30 inch more is going to be faster than the 12 inch mower because you got the same thing with the trimmer if i can get a little bit more line out then it's just going to be faster and more productivity so the guard does not allow me the length of line that i want for my strength trimmer so let me show you just wide passes on this hill to see if we can make it go fast so so [Music] um [Music] [Music] all right i'm not going to cut the entire hill but you can see i made long wide passes longer string goes faster shorter string with a guard i would not be able to do it that fast all right the number five reason to take the guard off and this may be the most important or the least important depending how you look at it is to give the complainer something to complain about on youtube because when i make these videos and showing no no guard you would be amazed at the comments i get that question my intellectual capabilities or what grade i finished in high school and everything i mean i'm obviously an irresponsible human for even doing this but it's somewhat entertaining somewhat sad that people come out of the woodworks to attack you for taking the guard off the trimmer if you feel like you need to guard on leave the guard on okay it was safer for you put that thing on and just sleep with it under your pillow at night but for the rest of us that can be more productive without the guard then take the guard off it's fine i haven't injured anybody yet nobody's went to the doctor for any kind of medical needs because they took the guard off at least in my situation okay i do remember having some blood flow from my head one time it was a small nick where something flew up and hit me and i was able to survive that and i was very thankful but sometimes i say let me just go ahead and pin a comment at the top of the comment list here just go ahead and tell me what an idiot i am for taking the guard off to save you the trouble of having to do it yourself because i know you got a busy day and you don't have time to be leaving negative comments on my youtube channel appreciate you guys watching my channel just hit 100 000 subscribers recently from the time i'm publishing this video if you're not in that group yet i would encourage you to hit the subscribe button follow along if you're in the lawn care business or thinking about getting into it whether mowing weed control fertilization mosquito spray and there's resources over at lawncarelife.com or maybe you just want to watch some of the new videos that are popping up on your screen now we'll see you in the next video

Channel: Lawn Care Life

Views: 1,165,391

Keywords: jason creel, lawn care life, weedeater, weed wacker, string trimmer, trimmer guard, trimmer guard on or off, remove trimmer guard, lawn care, weedeater guard

Id: sJP1uIzhpig

Length: 13min 46sec (826 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 18 2022