Black & Decker GT510 Review

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.



It should be noted at this stage that between the demise of my old hedge trimmer and the purchase of the GT510, I had an unfortunate experience with another piece of complete junk, namely the Eckman Long-Reach Telescopic Electric Hedge Trimmer. You can read about that fiasco in my reviews section.



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 mounting 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 (and equivalent) 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 to design them.



Regarding my one star rating, this was as little as I could award, but I wanted to give it fewer stars. Really it should be zero stars, or preferably a minus value.