Garden hose trolley project

On New Year’s Day I bought myself a present: A new trolley for my garden hose, which I mentioned in my first real post of the year. I posted about it on Instagram, where I said:

…I chose this one because it’s plastic (I had the handle on one rust away), but mostly because the handle is just enough higher that it makes it more comfortable pulling it around (the current one is shorter, which makes me stoop over when I use it). Also, there’s that pulley on a threaded rod thing that I hope will keep the damn hose from tangling. I also got a 2-metre hose to connect it to the tap. The one I have will go on the other side of the of the house so I can use it out front.

A few days ago I got around to putting it together (the new one is left in the photo above). The one I’m replacing is in the centre, and the old, old now handle-less one is on the right.

The handle of the new one may not look much taller, but trust me: Those few centimetres make a huge difference to a tall person like me. And that pulley-on-an-auger sort of thing feeds the hose onto the reel, then when it gets to the end it reverses and winds it going the opposite direction, then reverses again at the other end, and so on. It’s the first time I’ve ever been able to neatly wind a rose on its reel easily—without swearing, anyway.

Some side notes: The green hose on the middle cart is my original hose I’ve had for more than 20 years, I think, and it was a gift. It was originally on the trolley on the right. The hose on the new trolley came with the middle trolley, and Nigel put the hose connectors on it for me and put it on the cart without a handle (and he put the green hose onto the middle trolley for me; the green hose had an unusual connection to the trolley, so I couldn’t just move it to the new trolley). The connector for the grey hose’s hand spout thing fell off at the old house, and Nigel never got around to fixing it. I know I have some connector bits somewhere, but nowhere I could find easily (and garage was way too hot to spend any effort searching), so I don’t want to buy new ones just yet.

In addition to finding and installing the connector on the hose end, I also have to clean the oldest reel and wind my long heavy duty power lead onto it—once I find THAT!

The assembly itself was reasonably painless. It took me roughly 25 minutes to put it together, and I only made one mistake, but it was inconsequential, which is good: I couldn’t figure out how to take it apart to fix it. There were only 28 parts to assemble, of which ten were screws (see photo below).

It’s not often that a “needs assembly” item is as easy to put together as that hose trolly was, but I was glad for that. It was a minor project, and one that wasn’t necessarily on my list to do right away, but at least it’s done.

Check another one off the list.

This post began life as something I posted to my personal Facebook, but this version is revised.

This post has been updated. Follow the link to see the update.