"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of squirrels." - Me
Side-note: The movie "Oppenheimer" will be released July 21 of this year.
We've had a pest problem recently. Actually this has been going on for a couple of years, and it only recently became annoying enough that I was willing to put some serious effort into dealing with it.
The squirrels have been building little towns in the tall weeds outside the lawn area, and we would occasionally see them making their way across the lawn. They are cute, and I really don't like killing critters if I don't have to - even pests. However, they have recently begun burrowing holes in the lawn, and making dirt piles. At this point I felt it was time to take action.
I purchased some squirrel bait, and that seemed to have some effect. It's an anti-coagulant - Warfarin, a.k.a "Coumadin". It was not reducing the squirrel population to zero, and I put out quite a bit of bait on several occasions.
One day I was looking through the ads at Big 5 Sporting Goods, and saw a nice shiny Hatsan (never heard of that brand before) break-barrel air rifle with scope on sale for $89. It was advertised as shooting a .22 caliber (5.6 mm) pellet at 1000 ft/sec (305 m/sec). That's pretty solid performance for an air gun, even if it is just a 14 grain (0.9 gram) pellet. Unfortunately, the gun was so poorly manufactured and had such loose tolerances that it was impossible to hit a target either with open sights or with the scope.
Below: $89 worth of junk
I made a second trip to town and this time purchased a very similar Gamo break-barrel .22 caliber air rifle that also fires a pellet at 1000ft/sec. Where the Hatsan could not hit anything I aimed at, the Gamo does not miss. This precision is the difference between a $90 dollar rifle and a $250 dollar rifle. Lesson learned yet again - Buy once, cry once.
The Gamo has a couple of nice features over the other rifle. It can self-load from a 10 shot rotary magazine each time you cock the rifle's spring.
The second nice feature is that the spring doesn't compress any air until you actually fire the rifle. With a pump-up air rifle, once cocked, air can leak out the cylinder, leaving you with less and less muzzle velocity over time. With this design, the spring is compressed, not the air. Muzzle velocity is consistent each time the gun is fired - and the pellet hits really hard.
The dumb ones are already gone, like the little fella up above. The rest have gotten cagey, and I'm hoping another couple of rounds of bait will take care of the rest of them. As I said before, I don't enjoy taking lives, even of pests - but I also don't enjoy having my lawn destroyed. Summer "vacation".
Yesterday I was trimming some brush that's grown around a friend's boat. He's hoping to get it in the water soon, and I was trying to clear around it, as best I could. Some of the underbrush has 1cm thick fibrous branches. I was using a dull tri-blade brush-cutting head, and it seems that this was a bit too much for the 13 year old Ryobi CS-26.
Below: The tri-blade brush cutting attachment
The shaft inside the yellow tube snapped near the engine, and so the drive head quit spinning. After a reasonable bit of searching, I was not able to find a spare drive shaft online.
This baby is so old that it doesn't even have the trademark Ryobi lime-green coloring. It was time to replace the entire thing :(
I'm not a Ryobi fanboy - far from it. But I still wanted to be able to use the brush-clearing head that fit on the old unit, and so it was important that a new Ryobi string trimmer could also use that. I got online, checked specifications, checked inventory, and then drove to the Sandpoint Home Despot. It was a bit warmer when I was there yesterday.
I could not locate the item that I was looking for, so I found a sales lady, and asked where the two-stroke Ryobi string trimmers were. She said "we only carry battery-powered units." I told her that *anything* battery-powered wasn't going to be up to the job. Then I informed her that their web page claimed they had seven two-stroke string trimmers in stock. At that point she started poking around on her handheld device, and then suddenly she said "Ooops, I guess we have them after all." and took me right to them.
I also purchased a bag of "turf builder", a weed and feed product that greens the lawn while hopefully getting rid of the crabgrass and other annoying weeds like thistle and dandelions. That was about 3x more expensive than it was last time I got some. Never paid $90 for a bag of fertilizer stuff before... damn.
Below: Smells like... "vacation" :)
I'm pretty certain that the old string trimmer head will also fit on the new unit, so it will be nice to have three useful heads: The new one, the old string trimmer, and the old brush cutter.
Below: Got it unboxed and assembled. It seems to work well, and ergonomically it's a bit better. It has a larger fuel tank and a bit more power.
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