Tiller and more

Jacqueline and I decided to buy this tiller. We were inspired by the 20 year old 4 stroke beast my mother in law owns. The lightweight model on amazon received great reviews, and we were on a budget, so we decided to give it a shot.

The assembly itself was a total pain in the rear. Apparently the plastic crossbar holding the handles together was labelled backwards (front is back, back is front). This ended up causing 2 reassemblies and a lot of head scratching. Finally, we decided to follow the stickers, which I think are now incorrect, and this causes the power cable to hang free instead of fitting in the clip. Screwing this crossbar into the handles is a pain too - it requires lining up a hole in the metal handle, INSIDE the crossbar, with the hole in the plastic. I don't think we ever got this aligned, or the holes aren't the right size to accommodate the screws. Our screws are hanging halfway out of the holes right now.

After we got it assembled, we took it for a spin. Its lightweight and electric, which is nice, but also caused problems. The cord is always in the way, which I expected, but it proved to be more annoying than I thought. While I was excited about the lightweight aspect, it proved to be too light - it skipped off the ground and tried to bolt away continuously, rather than digging in. I felt like I had to grip and torque with my hands and wrists with all my might - something in entirely different from the beast of a tiller we used, which you just fought to keep straight.

So we're trying to till out this hard, rocky patch for a vegetable garden. The tiller is bouncing off the ground and away from me, barely digging in. We decided, after all the initial assembly, we must have the handles backwards. So we swapped them around. Big mistake. My wife said "now you need to flip the base to the other direction, right?" Well I was confused about it all, so I listened. Big mistake. Again, the machine tried to run off across the surface, but we had it reversed, so it drove straight at my feet. Thank God for the dead man trigger - atleast that worked - no injuries.

We flipped it back around again, and gave it a go in some less rocky, moister soil. With some serious torque applied, I was able to get it to bite in. Once it started actually churning, it did really well. I was able to just hold it in place, and all its force was directed down, rather than away. We then took it to the backyard to build a new bed for some iris transplants - it worked well here. Of course I was used to it by then, and the ground was nice and soft.

So in short review, this thing needs to be heavier, or built so that I can better apply torque with my arms. At the price I guess its ok, maybe a 2 out of 5. I would not recommend anyone to buy it, unless their yard was already tilled :)