Black & Decker GT510 500W 55 cm Hedge Trimmer

Very good hedge trimmers that have plenty power and a large enough blade to cut through most hedges easily.

My hand guard has snapped off though so the plastic for this is pretty poor quality. Im having to search for a new guard now.

I bought one of these pieces of junk to replace my aged Black & Decker hedge trimmer that had provided nearly a decade of service. I only replaced the old one because I was fed up with taking the damned thing to bits and re-soldering the electrical connections which had broken down through fatigue.

My replacement GT510, which was of an equivalent specification to my old one, I expected to last an equal amount of time. Unfortunately this piece of junk lasted around two hours.

It worked admirably to start with, but after an hour or so started to produce an ever-increasing volume of gear noise, finally jamming solid, only to serenade me with loud buzzing noises and smoke effects.

Unfortunately I had bought this thing towards the end of last year, to finish the last part of my previous hedge trimming task, so it spent most of its one-year guarantee period sat in the shed doing nothing. Upon its failure this year (after around two hours of use from new) I found it was just two weeks past a year since I bought it, so no chance of sending it back.

Rather than throw it away I decided to take it to bits to see if I could fix it. Once in two halves it was immediately blindingly obvious that this hedge trimmer had a colossal and damning design fault: The spindle for the blade's drive cog runs in three THIN PLASTIC protrusions for its upper support. Unbelievable! What half-wit designed this thing? The consequence of this laughable design feature is that the spindle - whilst receiving considerable lateral thrust from the blade and motor in operation - simply deforms the THIN PLASTIC bearing surfaces and elongates the spindle's bearing hole. What happens then is that the spindle and gear takes the path of least resistance (i.e sideways) causing the gears to mismatch and jam solid.

So, completely useless then. I cut the power lead off so I could use it to make an extension lead, and the hedge trimmer went in the bin.

I find it absolutely staggering that someone could have the skills to design something such as this hedge trimmer, but also to be clueless and half-witted enough to incorporate such an obvious and MASSIVE design flaw.

I used this thing to trim the same hedge (hawthorn and privet) that my previous hedge trimmer coped with for nearly a decade, so it's not as if I've been misusing it.

I recommend that anyone considering buying a Black & Decker hedge trimmer should not bother. If these fools can't design their products properly then they don't deserve any sales. I'll probably be buying a Bosch hedge trimmer next, unless I can find an old second hand Black & Decker model the same as my old one, which was obviously designed in the days before they started employing half-wits.

Unfortunately I was unable to give this piece of junk less than a one star rating, otherwise it would have got minus five stars, or zero at the very most.

I bought this item for my husband who had been moaning about the state of our garden (i dont do gardens)it arrived really quickly, and then sat there for a month and a half until my husband could not stand the state of the garden anymore, he went out yesterday, and came back with the biggest grin on his face, he said it was fantastic, so i went to have a look and we have no bushes left in the garden, what we do have is a bush lawn, (he's not good at clearing up his mess,) he loved it so much he went round to our eldery neighbour asking if there was anything she needed trimming, then on to our next door but one neighbour asking if she needed anything trimming they both declined as i think they saw a manic look in his eye and got a bit worried, he is now fretting because he said he will have to wait till next year to use it again.
On the practical side he thought that the safety buttons to turn it on were fantastic.