Hyundai HYBC5200X Review – UK Tested

I’d been putting off replacing my old strimmer for the best part of two summers, mostly because every petrol one I looked at felt like more machine than my plot actually needed. Then the bit by the compost heap got away from me again, the patch where the nettles take over if you blink, and a battery trimmer was never going to touch it properly.

That’s roughly how the Hyundai HYBC5200X ended up leaning against the shed instead of something cordless. It’s a 2-in-1, a bump feed nylon head for grass and a 3 tooth steel blade for anything woodier, and it’s been through a full season on my plot since.

Overview and first impressions

Out of the box you get the power unit, a lower shaft with the trimmer head already fitted, a separate blade, a double shoulder harness, a tool kit, a mixing bottle for the fuel, and a manual. Split shaft, so it comes apart in the middle for the boot of the car or a shed that’s already full of things you’ll never use again.

Fully built it’s about 1860mm end to end, which sounds enormous until you’ve got it on your shoulder and realise most of that length is shaft, not weight. The full machine comes in at 9.1 kilograms once it’s all together, harness and blade included, which is no featherweight but isn’t unusual for a 52cc machine either.

One thing did catch me out. Hyundai is a Korean name and I’d half assumed that meant Korean manufacture, but the compliance sticker and the paperwork both say China. Doesn’t bother me one way or another, the engine’s been fine, but if you’re buying on the assumption it’s coming out of the same factory as the cars, it isn’t.

Specifications and scores

Here’s the bit that took me longer than it should have to work out. The product page and the spec sheet both quote a 450mm cutting width with the line fitted and a line diameter of 2.5mm. Pull the actual manual out and its own technical data table says the cutting circle is 430mm and the line is 2.4mm. Same machine, same company, two different sets of numbers in two documents they wrote themselves.

I went round my flowerbed border with the line out as far as it would go and a tape measure, and it sits closer to the manual’s figure than the marketing one, for what that’s worth. The blade side has no such argument, everything I read and everything I measured agrees on 255mm. Even the weight has two answers depending which page you read, the full machine comes in at the quoted 9.1 kilograms, but the manual’s own technical data table separately lists the power unit alone, no shaft, no harness, no fuel, at about 5.6 kilograms, a different measurement entirely rather than a typo against the other figure.

How it performed in our tests

Assembly is seven steps and none of them are difficult on their own, but two of them go against what your hands expect. The trimmer head is left hand threaded, so you screw it on turning anticlockwise, which feels wrong every single time until you remember why. The blade’s centre nut is the opposite problem again, you loosen it by turning clockwise and tighten it anticlockwise, and I had a good thirty seconds of leaning on a spanner the wrong way before the manual’s note about left hand threads actually clicked. The shaft itself is the easy bit, slide the lower section up to the red line marked near the join and do up the blue hand screw until there’s no play in it.

The harness gave me more trouble than the rest of the build put together. It’s a double shoulder design with a quick release buckle and a clamp you slide along the shaft to balance the weight, and getting that clamp set so the machine hangs level took me most of an evening the first time, fiddling with a four millimetre hex key and swearing under my breath while the dog watched from a safe distance. Once it’s set you don’t touch it again, but that first session was a proper faff. The manual’s diagram for winding line into the spool doesn’t help matters either, the text tells you to wind one way and the little picture next to it shows the opposite direction, and I only worked out which one was right by doing it both ways and seeing which one stayed put.

Once it was together and running, the blade is the head I reach for now. It went through five foot nettles at the back of the plot without slowing down, and brambles that had been there long enough to root themselves twice over gave up after one decent pass. The line head is fine for tidying edges and getting in close round canes and pots, but it’s not the tool for anything with a stem thicker than a pencil. Use the right head for the job and this thing earns its keep.

Fuel, running time and the two cutting heads

This is a 52cc two stroke, so it runs on unleaded petrol mixed with two stroke oil rather than straight from the pump like a four stroke would. The ratio is 40 to 1, a litre of petrol wants 25ml of oil, and the bottle that comes in the box is marked out for exactly that so you’re not eyeballing it. Shake it properly before you pour, mine separates if it sits in the shed for more than a few days. Tank holds 1.2 litres, which has been enough for a full session round my plot with a bit left over, though I wouldn’t plan on much more than that without topping up.

It arrives completely dry, no fuel, no oil already in it, so the first job before anything else is filling it, and I did once try to start it cold out of sheer impatience before remembering that. Starting from cold is prime the bulb a good six or seven times until you can see fuel moving through it, choke on, hold the engine down with one hand and pull hard with the other. Mine usually goes on the third or fourth pull. Get greedy with the choke and keep pulling after it’s tried to catch and you’ll flood it, which I’ve done more than once, and the fix is just patience, choke off, let it sit a minute, try again as a warm start instead. Warm starts within ten minutes of switching off don’t need the choke at all, just the cord.

Refilling the line head is rotate the blue centre piece until the arrow lines up with the two holes, thread 4 metres of line through so you’ve got 2 metres sitting each side, then wind the blue piece clockwise until there’s 20cm left on each side. Took me a couple of goes the first time, it’s quick once you’ve done it once. Run it outdoors only, the exhaust carries carbon monoxide and it builds up fast in anything resembling an enclosed space, shed included.

Run it dry before it goes away for winter, then pull the spark plug and put a teaspoon of two stroke oil straight into the cylinder and give the cord a few pulls to coat everything inside before the plug goes back in. I learned the dry tank bit the hard way with a different machine years ago, fuel left sitting in a carburettor over several months turns into a gummy mess that costs you a Saturday morning and a new diaphragm to sort out.

Performance and limitations

Air filter wants a look every 25 hours or so, sooner if you’ve been working somewhere dusty, and it’s a tap and blow out job rather than anything that needs replacing often. Spark plug is a CDK L8RTC, checked after the first ten hours and then every fifty after that, gap should sit at 0.6mm. There’s a grease point on the gearbox angle that wants a squeeze of gear grease roughly every twenty hours, easy to forget because it’s tucked away and nothing tells you it’s due other than the manual’s own schedule. Cooling fins, the spark arrester, and the valve clearance all get a mention on that same schedule too, the first two are a quick check and clean I do myself, the valve clearance is one I leave to whoever services it.

Wear the ear defenders. I say that having ignored my own advice on a couple of occasions early on, and my ears were ringing by the time I’d finished the long hedge even with them on, which made more sense once I saw the sound power figure in the manual sitting around 105 decibels depending on which head’s fitted. The vibration through the handles is the other thing the manual is honest about that most people never read, after a long session my hands have had that slightly buzzy, numb feeling that goes away after half an hour but isn’t pleasant while it lasts. Gloves and proper breaks aren’t optional extras here, they’re the difference between an afternoon job and a sore week.

The small print in the manual says this is meant for domestic use, not professional, which struck me as an odd line given Hyundai will happily sell you a year of commercial cover on top of the usual three year domestic warranty if you ask. I’m not strimming for anyone but myself so it doesn’t change anything for me, but if you were planning on using this for paid work it’s worth knowing the manufacturer’s own paperwork doesn’t quite agree with its own warranty options.

A few months in, the bump feed has mostly behaved itself, though there was one stretch where it stopped releasing line as it should and I had to pull the head apart and sort the spool out by hand, which took ten minutes and hasn’t happened since. Everything else has started first or second pull every time I’ve gone to use it, which is more than I can say for the strimmer it replaced.

Final verdict

It’s not a light machine and you’ll feel it in your shoulder by the end of a long session, harness or no harness, so if you’ve got a small lawn and an occasional bit of edging to do, this is more strimmer than you need and a battery one would serve you better.

But if you’ve got a plot the size of mine, or worse, somewhere that grass and brambles fight back, the power’s there and the blade does the heavy lifting. The harness fiasco and the mismatched figures in Hyundai’s own paperwork are real gripes, not small ones, and I’d not pretend otherwise to anyone asking before they buy.

Once the harness is set right and you’ve worked out which way the threads turn, it’s been one of the more reliable bits of kit in my shed this year, and that counts for more with me than a tidy spec sheet ever will.