I have two flymo machines and neither of them work properly or do as the advert state they will do.

The strimmer is vastly superior to others in that it (self feeds) the string in the event of it breaking, to save me taking the whole thing apart and extending the string manually out of the tiny little hole from where it hangs in a half-coiled manner just waiting to jump back into the feeder as soon as you nearly have it all back together. 

it also pre-empts how fast I want it to go, apparently, it knows when I want it to go fast or slow? why would you want a slow strimmer? this is done by the returning tension on the string that doesn’t self-feed this actually- slows down when your trying to trim grass with it and speeds fully up when you hold it still in mid-air.

So, the self-feeding system and the intelligent speed system on this strimmer is about as much use to me as a gardening tool as tits on fish would be to aircraft manufacturing.

The mower is almost but not quite as useless, as the strimmer in as much as it could be used as a lampstand if you were that artistically inclined.

It hovers, well it does until its half full then because of the weight of the grass it hovers substantially lower on the grass therefore as you move across the lawn the cut gets shorter and shorter as you add more weight. This totally negates the fact of having a lever for height adjustment at the front of the machine, so you can if you want to adjust the height of the cut “as you go across the lawn” I’d say maybe every fifteen feet to make an adjustment, yeah, that should do it.

The grass collection box has a clear Perspex part in the lid to see when its full up, are you being serious, it’s got grass being thrown into it this so called clear panel becomes unclear in a matter of minutes for the first ten minutes of use out of the box never to be looked through again. The only indication that you get fir its being near or full is that you are digging the lawn up with the blade and clumps of grass are lifting the machine as you push with all the strength you can muster on a Sunday morning to get the thing to move across your lawn.

Also to note for this wonder of garden machinery is that if like me you have one single divot on your grass because you own a dog ! then the air cushion that it supposed to keep it aloft in its first moments of emptiness and hovering wonderfully whoosh’s out from under the plastic skirt and the whole thing then comes into contact with the lawn curtsy of gravity, then courtesy of friction you will not move it unless you pull it back onto perfectly flat ground where you may stand a chance of moving off in a different direction.

The upshot of all this is that now my strimmer is in bits in the rubbish bin awaiting collection with the plastic recycling on Wednesday and the mower is back in the storage shed where it will gather inordinate amounts of dust and cobwebs while I satiate my anger with a shopping visit to the garden centre to buy something with wheels. Good old fashioned wheels. And a collection basket that is vented with a grill that you can see is full of grass when it is. Something that won’t plummet towards the surface of the earth as soon as it leaves the ironing board surface of a bowling green lawn.

Fandango x