Troy Bilt Model TB675-EC Straight Shaft Gas Trimmer Product Test

Hi, Dirt Farmer Jay here from www.DirtFarmerJay.com. I'm doing a follow-up on the earlier video that we did on the unboxing of the Troy-Built 4-Stroke Straight Shaft String Trimmer, and I wanted to give you guys all a follow-up on this to let you know how easy it is to use, the start-up, all that sort of thing, and just kind of the skinny on the whole thing. Well, the machine is, all appearance is very well made. As I've said in the earlier video, we've had very good success with the Troy-Built brand having a lawn tractor of theirs, and it serves us very well. It's easy to service, etc., and so I thought I'd give it a shot on this unit as well, and if you haven't seen the other video, you can look for that on our YouTube channel as well. It just shows the assembly of the unit, how it came boxed, etc. Today what we're going to do right now, though, is go ahead and start up the unit. I've actually used it already and did quite a bit of extreme trimming. I'll say right off that I like the unit. It's heavier than the 2-Stroke unit that I used to have, which was the Curve Shaft unit. This has got a longer reach. It's heavier. However, the balancing is very good on it. It's easy to use, and the bump head, which I've not used before with great success because I had something that was like a 15-year-old technology before, the bump head on this unit worked flawlessly. It worked very well, fed forward, really sped up how quickly I was able to get all of our yardscape done, and that's a combination of both trimming against straight, smooth surfaces, curved surfaces, such as edge concrete that goes along the edges of sidewalks, as well as stonework, where it's pretty rough, it's pretty abrasive, it's hard on the string trimmer as far as the actual string itself. It wears it off fairly fast. However, I was able to get all this done in one use without having to reload the head, and it went very well. As far as startup, we're going to go ahead and start up this unit here and just use the directions. As you see on the side of the unit here, number one, you're looking at the gas reservoir. This is after about an hour's worth of use, and I don't know if you can see that in the video or not, but the fuel level's about right in there. So in an hour's worth of use, we were able to get just a half tank of gas, and because it's four-stroke, you don't have to pre-mix the fuel with oil because the lubrication comes from a very small sump in there that we showed on the first video. As far as starting up the unit, what you're going to do is you're going to start in the cold position over here. You have a slider right here that is meant for first getting it primed up and ready to go, warm up, and then full use over here. As far as shut off the unit when it's running, you don't want to choke it out or do anything here. You would just leave it in run position, let it return to idle, and then right over here, there's a switch right here that you would just push, and notice it rocks back. Once you're done pushing it, it's in run position, and that may look a little awkward, but consider where it is on the unit. It's right there. There's the trigger. And by the way, I use two fingers if my one finger gets tired and I kind of switch up a little. But notice where it is. If I want to shut it off, I'm just going to rock it forward at the end when you let it return to idle. Okay, so let's go ahead and take a look at starting this up. The first thing you're going to do is you're going to pump this 10 times, and you're going to get that in to fill up the fuel line here. And I was able to do that in less. I don't know if you can see that or not, but you can see fuel's in the bubble. Very visible that now we have fuel going in the carburetor. I'm going to put it in the cold position. We'll just see what happens here. This is where you just kind of pull this a couple times to kind of, ah, it actually wants to start. That's all right. It's idling. So it's fairly warm here. It's late spring in the Mountain West. The machine's not real cold. So you can hear it just idling. Now here's a cool thing on this. That's on the choke position. I'm going to go ahead, well, I didn't give it any gas here. We'll do it again here. So I'm going to go ahead and bring it up to the center because I think I'm flooding it. There it is. Okay. So I'm going to let it warm up right here at this point. Now, just to let it warm up for 30 to 60 seconds. I found that to be the case. If you don't let it warm up, it'll stall out on you. And, um, I'm a lousy timekeeper in my brain. I'll say 30 seconds. Okay. Um, okay. That's 30 seconds. Well, it's not. It takes a few moments to let it warm up. There's something I like about this unit. Here, you can hear it start to do fine here. Not, not calling, what I call, crapping out. Notice when I let it come down to idle, that the head returns to neutral, which I really like on that because if you ever walked around with a string trimmer, where it's directly linked without a clutch and you accidentally walked by something, uh, your prize peony or something. Well, it's really easy to whack that thing off. Whereas if I speed that up, knows what happens, up it comes, there's about operating range right there. And when I bring it back down, it'll come down and coast. Okay. All right. Back over here. That's still in the warmup position. I'm going to go ahead and bring it over. There we are. We're ready to work now. Okay. Now, a couple other things real quickly. This handle right here, as we showed on the other video, swivel, it slides around here. It does not move up and down the handle real easily, but this is extremely handy because as you're working, you may want to switch your position as you get into something. And that balance point really helps to get this where you want it. So let's just do a little bit here. Okay. This is fairly freshly mowed, as a matter of fact, the last 24 hours, so let's walk over here. I'm going to show you right along this curb right here. Very clean, very easy, very good to use. I think they did a good job for the price point on this trimmer. It's not a professional unit. You can pay up $500 or so for a unit. This is about $200. It's not the homeowner grade either. It's a good mid-range. It looks like it's well-built. As you can see, there's a nice straight shaft, and there's a good reach on that. Notice that my feet are way back like this, and I noticed right off a lot of that spoilage on my legs and feet as far as flinging stuff. Does a great job. Troy Build, I think you got a winner on your hands. I'm Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com. If you like this video, please like it, subscribe to our channel. If you have any comments, questions, or another model you'd like us to take a look at or you'd like to brag on, be sure to write us. Thanks for watching.