Weedwhacker innovation
- by Mike Johnson on May 13th 2008 4:00PM
- seasonal, weekend projects, landscaping, tools
In 1852 Victor Hugo coined the phrase"necessity, the mother of invention". I couldn't disagree more. Laziness is the mother of invention. The wheel? Ug was tired of dragging stuff around. The car? Who really wants to clean up after and take care of a horse for its whole life? Paper? Carving letters into stone is way hard. See? Laziness drives us to invent things so we can expend less and less energy to do the tasks required of us in our daily lives.
Ryobi has latched on to this basic principle and as a result they have dreamed up a new way for us to be lazy. Traditionally if you used a string trimmer (colloquially known as a "weedwhacker") that was gas powered you were in for a work out every time you started it. Depending on what brand of gas powered trimmer you had, there were different arcane rituals to use to start it, but they all involved repeated yanking on the pull start. Ryobi has changed all that. I'll explain how after the break.






