Yes, that’s right, there are no more sales of new trimmers.
Fingers crossed that Yarbo ships the trimmers on time to all the preorders.
Although to be honest, in some case it might be better to wait until they fix any known issues before shipping a potentially defective product.
Hopefully the trimmer proves to be worth the (very long) wait! I’d sure love to start using it this spring.
So I’ve been using mine for a little bit now and yes there are some line feed issues. Surprisingly, while it’s been performing a plan I haven’t seen any issues, but while driving HAL manually to do my remapping I was quite regularly seeing the line feed error. I don’t know how it determines when to do a line feed other than the one setting that does a line feed every X minutes. I have definitely seen a couple of instances where the trimmer gets into some thing tough like thorns and the string gets worn to almost nothing in a couple of seconds and the trimmer can’t seem to get the string to feed after that. It also seems that the line feed only occurs when the trimmer stops and starts, so there was a couple of times when I was driving manually where I had to start and stop the trimmer several times to recover the line.
Other than that, it seems to work fairly well.
What I’m hearing from some of the PPP is that 0.095 line size almost eliminates those issues. Their default string is too thin/small and not quite as rigid. When you have the cutting wheel up against what you are cutting, that default line works well. Anything that hits it below that wheel is where you start having issues with it prematurely wearing before the timer fires. My understanding is that it will try and stop/start the trimmer a few times when it detects this issue, but if there isn’t enough weight (enough line left) for the centrifugal force to fling it outwards, then it just unspools inside the head and throws the line feed error. The thicker string helps prevent that. If you do encounter line feed error, first thing you want to do is grab the line and yank it 3-4 times really hard. Then turn the trimmer on by hand with the controller so it feeds the line. Do that a few times. If you see it cut some line off, you should be good. If not, yank a couple more times and try again. If it still doesn’t trim any line, then you need to check the spool. The line might be crossed inside or tangled, etc.
This is the string one of the PPP members is using and says works very well.
Ya, that’s exactly what I’d figured out. You can hear the difference when the string starts to get short. It seems that once the string gets below about 2-3 inches, the line won’t auto-feed. But, like you say, if you tip the head up and give the line a couple of hard tugs, then turn the trimmer on and off a couple times, you’ll hear the difference when the line advances and even when the string hits the cutoff blade.
Thanks for the replacement string suggestion though!
I don’t even bother tipping the head. I just reach under and find the string and pull.
Also for those that read this who get their trimmers and can’t clear a line feed error because they aren’t home to yank on the line. You can go into work preferences and disable the trimmer so you can still get mowing done with the trimmer disabled.