Best Makita Whipper Snippers and Edgers

Doesn't hold mulch line. Very frustrating – Only holds 3m of line. Very hard to feed on they way they suggest (rather than pulling it apart to wind on). You are forever stopping to refill the… Read more

line. Starting to regret moving away from Stihl. Will look for a different whipper snipper head that holds more line.

Frustrating to use in real life – I don't where Makita tests this line trimmer, but obviously not in real life. If you have a block of land with a lot of hard edges don't waste your… Read more

money on this piece of sh...! For me, who has to cut mostly along concrete edges, this bloody thing is nothing but frustrating *because the line breaks constantly*!! By constantly I mean exactly this: constantly! It's fine for doing garden edges, but we own a corner block with a lot of concrete kerb, where the line sometimes doesn't last for more than 3 or 4 metres - before you have to take the head apart, retrieve the broken line end, thread it through the metal eye, and try to clip the head back on! The photos in the collage are with a time stamp (and I have the originals as proof); the line broke at 11:00am, 11:04, and again at 11:07 - when I gave up in frustration... The same happens, albeit not quite as frequently, along the edge of a Colorbond fence.

This line trimmer might work well on a putting green of a golf course. I assume that's where Makita tested it. In "real life" it's not worth its money and your frustration.

Yes, currently I'm using whipper-snipper line from ALDI; the more expensive bright orange line from Makita, which came with the whipper-snipper at purchase, was even worse. It would get so hot that it would fuse (melt) together with several layers on the spool. The '1' setting speed is too slow to cut through any grass runners, at speed '2' the line constantly breaks off right at the eye of the head, where it feeds out. So you have to take the bloody thing apart and feed line back out; do 3-5 metres of cutting, take it apart again, and so on... I could be faster with secateurs trimming the edge of the lawn.

And if you own a lawn that resembles a "putting green", you can save your money on this Makita line trimmer too! I'm sure you'll find one for less than half the money that will do the same job... I had been an early adopter of battery powered gardening tools and in 2010 bought a cheap no-name line trimmer off eBay for under $90; it did a more reliable job (on the same block, same conditions) that this Makita for over $400. Unfortunately I sold it in 2013 before we went overseas for a few years.

Once again Makita you fail to test your garden care products with actual real live people. At least 50% of us are women. I would suggest next time… Read more

you design any lighter weight garden care items, you get a range of people to test the item. Women generally do not have either a wide handspan nor do they have a vicelike grip. The cord reel is so difficult to remove that I have to resort to either finding someone with better grip or some kind of prising tool. Why am I removing the cord reel every 2 minutes? Why is the factory wound reel so tight it will not bump release? Do you actually test anything? Are you short of testers?. The cord doesn’t last long enough for me to do a 10 m run of the pavement edge, it breaks just inside the cartridge which involves 10 minutes of trying to release the squeeze mechanism. Surely you could do better by getting a range of people including women to test the prototypes then you wouldn’t be getting one star reviews. I hate it!