We evaluated everything here in our test zone—for yard tools, that includes lawns, golf courses, wood lots,
and gardens. With the mowers, we cut long and short grass, in conditions from the lush dampness of spring to
high summer’s long, dry days, rolling up and across hills to gauge the uniformity of the cut, quality of bagging or
mulching, and ease of use. Hedge trimmers we took to yews, boxwoods, and, of course, a behemoth hedge—
ours was 8-feet tall, 6-feet wide, and 60-feet long. We brought string trimmers to a mess of shin-deep weeds,
briars, and saplings. We cut as many “cookies” of dense white oak as we could with each chainsaw from our test
batch, taking into account trigger response, vibration, and stalling. And we used the leaf blowers to clear sawdust and leaves
from 6x14-foot and 6x12-foot areas, respectively, before we took them to a local airport and fired them up in front of a plane’s
pitot tube to measure the wind speed they generated.T E S T I N G
OUTDOOR
TOOLS
131012BEST
WIDE-CUT
LAWN
MOWERBEST GAS
CHAINSAWBEST
GENERATORMarch/April 2020 61