Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As mentioned in other reviews the edger is powerful but it has difficulty plowing through thick, matted turf. In my case the grass had overgrown the edges of my brick walk. It had been a couple of years since it was edged before so there were at least 3" of grass that had to be cut back. Since my lawn is irrigated and fertilized regularly the soil is always moist. This compounded the situation and made it necessary to stop every 20' or so to dig out the dirt and grass that had accumulated in the shroud (the blade enclosure). I know that they warn about using it in "wet" grass, but it should be designed to handle earth with moisture in it. Another problem was that the back edge of the shroud kept catching on the thick grass as it moved forward, and the wheels would not ride up over the clumps without a hefty push. I had to keep rocking the unit back and forth to get it to progress and cut to the depth I wanted. This might be corrected to some degree with larger rear wheels. At any rate, with sufficient patience, the edger performs well. I have not had the problem of the blade coming loose as so many others have complained about--at least not yet. Time will tell about this. As you can see in the attached photo, the machine has cleaned up one side of my walkway quite well. Of course, you have to employ other tools to dislodge and remove the sods once they are cut free. The 80' of the one side of the walk took me about 45 minutes. This was the first time I used the edger. I expect the other side will take me less time tomorrow now that I have the hang of using the machine. I also expect that the edger will work much more efficiently once an edge has been established and all that is necessary is to maintain it in the future. Followup: Finished the job the following day, and as expected, the other side of the walk went quicker. Once this opposite edge was cut back to where it needed to be, and the sod clumps were removed, I did another pass on both sides of the walk with the edger. I wanted to make nice, straight, clean edges. This final edging went very quickly and gave me the finished look I wanted. Now, having done both sides of the 80' walk twice (4X80'=320') I can comment on the question of the blade loosening. No problem whatsoever. To test for this, I used a large adjustable crescent wrench to hold the spindle from turning, and a 15 mm socket to tighten the nut. After the first 80' pass I did the first check for tightness. I was able to tighten the nut about 1/8 turn only. It was pretty tight, and must have come from the factory that way. Then, after the job was complete (three more passes) I checked it again. This time I was unable to tighten it any more. No loosening at all had occurred. So, I can only conclude that others who have had the loosening issue either didn't confirm the tightness of the blade to begin with, or they were cutting through tough ground--perhaps hitting stones along the way. Bottom line: Other than the problem mentioned regarding the unit struggling to make the initial cuts through overgrown, thick grass, the edger does a very good job. This is especially true if you keep up with your edging and don't let the grass encroach over your pavement so that you have to cut a lot of it back. I'm thinking that if I do the job every year at the beginning of the season the machine will do fine. On the other hand, if you let it go two or three years like I did you can plan to do quite a bit of work to bring things back to where you want them to be. Even then, with patience, the Worx WG896 will make the job a lot more manageable.