[Julesomega]

A visitor here recently was impressed with the length of hedges around the garden, about 150yds, and offered a telescopic pole hedge trimmer to save me climbing on steps to reach the tops at about 8', said they couldn't use it due to arthritis. I don't know if they had ever used it, but it looked really useful so today I plugged it in, whereupon the thermal cutout on the extension reel tripped. I reset it and tried the cutter which worked just brilliant. Tried another cut and the cutout tripped again so I reset it and tried again. This time there was no response, the motor would not run

The Screwstation catalogue has a really nice one for about £60, but before I got the car out I took a few screws out of the gift unit and the switch worked fine and the Class-X capacitor was ok (measured 1.0MΩ) so I measured the connection from the plug to the switch. Open circuit! Easy fix, just replace the fuse! As I was holding the continuity tester I prodded it across the Bussman 13A fuse, which was perfectly ok

Must be the cable fractured just outside the plug, we've all seen that. Still holding the continuity tester I quickly disproved that theory but went on to find an O/C between the 'L' pin of the plug and the internal fuseholder

Is this a common problem with moulded-on plugs? Anyway, it was then cut off and an elderly Duraplug was fitted and now it all works fine. If I were really interested I'd test for intermittent shorting between the Live and Neutral pins when the plug is waggled

I'll save my trip until I need some more heavy duty plug tops, when I'll be down to Toolstation who do some very nice modern ones