A nice chap from the marketing team for Fiskars looked me up not long ago and asked me to write a review of their new range of garden blades. Having always thought Fiskars were quite good but not really having much on which to base that assumption, I accepted with two provisos. The first was that I’d say exactly what I thought, however harsh that might be. The second was that I’d put them through some testing and compare them head to head with my tools, specifically what I consider to be the finest bladed tools on the market – Felcos.

The products in question are from the new Fiskars Powergear range, and no, they don’t have cruise control, automatic windows or free air-con. They are however designed for ease of use and have been certified by Arthritis Australia. This is because they have a gear mechanism that levers the blades open and closed rather than relying on the strength of the user. The line up consists of a pair of secateurs, hedging shears and loppers.

Gear mechanism

Fiskars Range for testing

1. Cleanest cut – a rough cut damages cuttings, the host plant, takes much longer to heal and can introduce diseases into the damaged tissue. As my ‘Machinery Ops’ class teacher says: “Cut the tip off one finger with a scalpel, another with a rusty saw and then you tell me which one feels worse”!

2. Comfort & ease of use - this doesn’t matter too much until you have to winter prune two dozen roses or clip a hedge. Then it becomes the difference between being able to type for the following week and having painful, rigid claws on the ends of your arms incapable of grasping so much as a cup of tea.

3. Cleaning & maintenance – Gardening is a dirty business. Grit, grime, sap and dew can cause significant damage to tools unless they’re regularly cleaned and maintained. You shouldn’t need a PhD to be be able to take your tools apart and clean them.

4. Durability – No one wants to spend as much money on tools as we’re expected to nowadays for something that won’t last.

My focus will be on the secateurs for the comparison. Here are our test subjects, from left to right:

Secateurs - Powerkut, Fiskars, Felcos, Victorinox budding & grafting knife

Powerkut ratchet secateurs – instant fail for the use of a ‘k’, but these are designed to make cutting dead wood and thicker branches easier through a ratcheting system.  They work quite well – each squeeze cuts part way through the branch.

Fiskars Powergear secateurs, looking all new and shiny next to the other well worn tools.

Felco 4 secateurs – best secateurs on the market. You can see that these are well loved.

Victorinox budding & grafting knife – I have included this for curiosity in the blade test.  It’s incredibly sharp for surgical precision so I’m interested to see how the secateurs compare.

The competition in the loppers and shears field is more restricted and my existing tools in this area are moderately rubbish, so I’ll simply trial these.

Alright then, lets get started.

Cleanest Cut - Rose Cuttings Test

First things first. EVERYONE should have a good quality blade sharpener to keep their blades sharp – they’re worth the money. I have had this one for many years now and as its made of a harder, carbon-based compound that metal, the edges stay razor sharp, it doesn’t wear down and will last a lifetime.

Clean cuts with minimal damage all round

A good clean cut when taking rose cuttings is critical to their chance of striking, so I decided to test out our secateurs on my roses. All of the secateurs performed extremely well in this test. I used the Fiskars straight out of the box without sharpening and they gave a nice clean cut, but I tend to keep my Felcos razor sharp and they won the day here. Had I sharpened the Fiskars also, I we might have had different results. Suprisingly to me, the knife gave the worst cut – it fell down slightly on getting through the harder wood on this inside without an anvil to push the blade against, and the stem got ever so slightly crushed against my cutting mat. All in all however, they produced almost indistinguishable, high quality cuts.

Just out of interest, I also tested them against a thicker branch from a young ash in my backyard. Here the Powerkut’s came into their own. The cut was immaculate with no bruising of the outer bark, where the Felcos and Fiskars both produced a small amount. The knife didn’t have a prayer.

Comfort & Ease of Use - Mat & Honey Tests

The two tests in this category investigated how the tools felt in use. I simulated the repetitive cutting action used in hacking through undergrowth by cutting thin strips from a coir doormat. Similarly, secateurs can get gummed up with sap, dew and grit when in use so I emptied a bottle of honey onto them – blades, hinges and handles – and let them harden in the sun for a while before use.



Results of the mat test were interesting. The Powerkuts couldn’t cope with the squishiness of the mat as it couldn’t ratchet against it, so it was only able to cut a few fibres. The Felcos cut through the mat quite successfully but rapidly gave me a sore hand from the power required to squeeze, the weight and the hard metal handles.
The Fiskars on the other hand were clearly in their element. The handle on the Fiskars secateurs actually rotates and it curls with your hand as you squeeze. As it turns, it pushes the gear at the top of the handle which in turn pulls the other handle towards it. The feeling of having the handle I was gripping turn with my hand took me some getting used to, but the design is ergonomic and quite ingenious.



The gear also meant that none of the Fiskars tools were in any way hampered by the honey, as the lightest squeeze was amplified to open and close the blades. The other friction-based tools did suffer from this and it was worse the more complicated the hinge mechanism, meaning the Powerkuts particularly struggled.

Cleaning & Maintenance

Now that my tools were now coated in thickened honey, it provided me with a good opportunity to try taking them apart for cleaning and resharpening the blade.
The Fiskars secateurs required no tools whatsoever to take apart, which is a handy feature. A turnable knob sits tops the bolt between the blades allowing it to be easily removed or tightened by hand, and they disassembles into relatively few pieces. Blades are easy to clean, sharpen and replace when old. However, honey and grit did accumulate in the gears and this required a toothbrush to clean out properly. The hollow, plastic, rotating handle was also difficult to clean out, requiring immersion in water and poking things inside it.
My Felcos need two socket or monkey wrenches to remove and tighten the bolt, but other than that are extremely easy to disassemble, clean and replace worn blades. The newer models have eliminated the annoying faffing around trying to get the tension right when reassembling.
I gave up on disassembling the Powerkuts as there were so many bolts and hinges to remove that it became annoying. The bolts on the shears and secateurs that were set tightly by the manufacturer, but the tools were quite easy to take apart completely so that any part is replacable.

Durability

Its very hard to come up with an official test for this given it is something that is demonstrated over a long period of time. I considered driving over the secateurs with my car on the driveway, as I’m quite confident the Felcos would survive, but the Fiskars (with their hollow handle) wouldn’t and this really gave me my answer. This criteria comes down to design for longevity.
Felcos and Fiskars both allow any of their components (most importantly the blades) to be replaced. My Felcos are solid metal and will likely outlast me. Fiskars chose comfort over longevity by building them to be lightweight and allow rotation. Its worth noting that the plastic used is very high quality and is unlikely to break any time soon, but can’t compare to metal for durability. Powerkuts, though the handles are solid metal, probably won’t outlast the Fiskars given the number of pieces and some thin metal parts on the hinges.

Shears and Loppers

I was extremely impressed with the Fiskars hedging shears and loppers. They performed much the same as the secateurs – clean cut, easy to use, easy to clean – made with the durability and lightweight of a metal alloy, however it is the comfort of use that is critically important with these kinds of tools. I pruned my lavender, osteospermum and lopped a few branches from a tree, and each of these tasks were a piece of cake. I also gave these the honey test and they didn’t even pause thanks to the gear mechanisms – they just powered straight through. I can’t give a comparative assessment on these because they aren’t even in the same league as my old tools, but they were both outstanding and the loppers in particular win the overall performance award in my opinion. They easily removed branches reserved for loppers twice the length, required a fraction of the effort and the cut was high quality.

Osteospermum

Loppers vs. Tree

Summary

Overall, I found this an interesting exercise. My bias to my beloved Felcos had made me believe them to be superior to all other secateurs across the board and I found this not to be the case. The Fiskars tools exceeded my expectations and were outstanding in ease of use, earning their recognition by Arthritis Australia. The only area they were noticably weaker than the Felcos was in durability, which is exactly as you would expect. As close as the contest was though, the Fiskars secateurs retail for significantly less that Felcos do – the difference is around AUS$30 at my local hardware store. Food for thought.
The loppers and hedging shears for Fiskars were stunning all round, and it is perhaps these that push my final decision to choose comfort as the deciding factor. So the winners list is …