Repairing the string trimmer

We had several days of snow in April, but now we are up to 15 hours a day of sunlight, with a couple hours each of dawn and twilight on either side of that.  Now things are finally getting warm and the grass is taking off.  Spring is always like this...  You might have t-shirt weather one day and a freeze after that.

I usually get caught off-guard turning the sprinkler system back on as well.  Spring is sometimes very short-lived or just weird up North.  Earlier this month it was time to mow and weed-whack for the first time, and that's when the problem came up. 

Actually this annoying issue was happening last year as well, but this spring it finally reached the point where I had to deal with it.  The weed-whacker simply wouldn't run at a speed above idle.  It would die if you opened the throttle too quickly.

The weed whacker is a Ryobi CS26 - a little two-stroke 26cc displacement string trimmer.  The power head looks like this:

I bought this little guy about 10 years ago when we moved to a little farmhouse rental.  I suddenly had to start dealing with an acre of grass, and my little electric unit wasn't going to do the job.

This cute little place.  It would take a lot of extension cords to reach all of those edges.

So I bought the Ryobi, and it worked great for quite a while.  I wore out a couple of spools, and went through several hundred feet of string.  Not a bad little rig, till it started sputtering.  A shot of carb cleaner didn't make any difference.

I was pretty sure it was starving for fuel, but wasn't sure just where or why.  The adjustment screws require a special tool, so I couldn't try tuning the carb.  I also didn't feel like taking the carburetor apart to see what was the matter with it.  So I bought a kit.

So the first step was to clean off the work bench of most of my winter projects.

16 bucks from Amazon.

Wow.  Everything you might need!  Two spare priming bulbs even!

You need a torx screwdriver to get these off.  They are quite long and actually screw into the engine block, passing through the filter, carburetor and intake manifold.

Side view

Intake screen off.

Old carburetor

 New carburetor installed.  Installing the new fuel filter - before stuffing it into the gas tank.

After a few pulls it started, and it now runs perfectly.  Cheaper and more interesting than replacing the trimmer.  I wasn't too keen on getting rid of it since I have an additional drive unit with a brush cutter on it.

A string trimmer that can do some serious work in the underbrush!