About a year ago we purchased an electric weed cutter to mow some weed around our house. We live in a house where we are surrounded by plots of land on which no one has yet built their house. This is a welcome boon because we don’t have to worry about neighbors and have ample light and breeze coming from all sides of our house. The problem however is that a lot of weeds grows soon after the rainy season and that attracts rats, snakes and scorpions. The owners of these plots don’t seem to care about the up-keep. So we clean up parts of the plots surrounding our house.


Weed beside our house (the bigger trees are something we are growing)


Initially we used to do manual cleaning technique which is basically pulling out the weeds by hand, cutting the overgrown grass with cutters or trimmers and raking or ploughing the smaller grass. It was a very labour intensive task and we used to do it most weekday afternoons after lunch. This had a few benefits. We get vitamin D, exercise, and break from sleepy afternoons.


Tools used to remove weed


We have been doing this since we retired in 2018. It was especially useful during the COVID lockdown period when we were all cooped up in the house. But as time went by, we became busy while searching for a farm and soon after purchasing our farm. So we thought we needed to speed up the process with a weed cutter. I did not want to buy a petrol cutter. So we decided to go with an electric one.


I read some pros and cons between electric and petrol cutters and it seems like petrol cutters are more preferable since that have more power. Still I decided to give the electric one a try. Since we never purchased a cutter, I wanted to find something cheap and disposable in case it did not serve the purpose. So we bought a cheap one on Amazon.


I did not expect much from it, but it did the job really well. It came with several attachments to cut different things like grass, plant stems and even larger branches. It came in handy even in our farm when we had to clear some weed to walk around inaccessible places.


The saw tool on the weed cutter was able to chop off this branch


Anyway, recently when I was cutting some weed, after some time it suddenly stopped working. I thought may be the battery died, although I fully charged the previous day. So I changed the battery. It still wouldn’t run. The motor was not hot either. So much for a cheap cutter, or so I thought.


Obviously, like any other time, if something breaks, my first instinct is to disassemble it. If I can’t repair it, at least I can understand how things work. I can’t break something more than it is already broken. I removed all the screws and struggled a bit to open some parts but eventually reached to the motor section.


Well, the cause of motor failure was simple – a loose wire. Basically the motor terminals were connected to the wires using a blade connection. The connection came loose and the negative terminal wire was just hanging out. I tried connecting but it was too loose to stay in place. Perhaps all the vibrations while mowing caused the connector to unplug. Nothing a pliers can’t fix. So I pinched the female connector a bit and now it plugs in nicely.


Unplugged negative terminal (black wire)


Tested it out before putting back everything. It was working satisfactorily. I cleaned the motor, sprayed a bit of WD-40 and put everything back together. Now it is working like a charm. Everything was good except for the fact that I could not figure out where I removed one screw from. Lets hope it is not from an important place :).