VEVOR 52 Inch Lawn Sweeper Tow Behind, 26 cu.ft. Large Pull Behind Grass Sweeper, Heavy Duty Leaf & Grass Collector with Dumping Rope Design, Adjustable Sweeping Height for Picking Up Debris & Grass

First – the assembly instructions are abysmal. The Sweeper portion of the build is not horrible, but they use terms like “flat pad” for a flat washer, and “R-type sales” for hitch pins & clips. Very weird. Speaking of the clips, they are used throughout the bag assembly and are made of very thin wire, and struck us as very flimsy. Silly place to cut manufacturing costs – everything else seemed well made & sturdy.The bag instructions are completely unintelligible, and only got us pointed in the general direction we needed to go. (By “we”, I mean my girlfriend & I – the bag assembly is definitely a 2-person job). Several parts had to be disassembled & reassembled to get the final outcome correct.Once assembled, the adjustment & use instructions were written pretty clearly (different author?).Hitching up to my Husqvarna TS242XD 42″ lawn tractor was fairly straightforward, but again, the hitch pin clip was made of very thin wire & seemed fragile; the “height adjustment spacers” are two, 1″ long metal tubes that you place above or below the hitch to adjust it’s height – very clunky and easy to lose. For all that, they only allow about a 3″ height adjustment range.Ok, built & hitched up. The instructions describe how to set optimal sweeping height (how far into the grass the brushes go). While clear, it’s difficult to see this in action, and some trial & error is needed. Once set, the sweeping action is actually pretty good – most of the leaves & small debris (emphasis on small) gets swept in an “overhand” direction & literally flies into the large collection hopper. It’s pretty impressive, and works well at speeds of about 4-7 mph. The brushes are driven by gears on each wheel (or belts; I’m not sure, since they’re sealed). This means the brushes are spinning faster than the wheels, for pretty efficient action. I quickly discovered that branches or large twigs will jam the whole system, and the wheels will drag along the ground without turning. Even with the almost 30hp of the tractor, this is fairly noticeable. This resulted in several unplanned stops to clear the brushes. Also, I found that the sweeper seemed to work better when the tractor’s mowing/mulching blades were engaged (the side eject port blocked). Any depressions in the swept area were not swept very well – this unit works best on a flat, level lawn (and it works pretty well in those conditions).Figuring out how to rig the rope (used to tip the leaf hopper bag forward, to dump the collected leaves) also took some experimentation. The rope is nylon, and slippery, especially if you’re wearing gloves, so I tied knots along its length, to make it MUCH easier. The end of the rope as provided is “unsealed”, and will begin to unravel & fray almost immediately. A quick application of heat solved that, but make sure you’re not anywhere near dry leaves or worse, the tractor’s fuel system (no, I didn’t have a fire, but the risk was very real).Dumping the full hopper was best done while moving, at a slow speed; with some practice it became easier. Note that the full bag will leave a sizeable pile of leaves & cuttings on the lawn; too big to easily drive over to dump on the same spot again. So I found that making some tight turns before/during the dumping process left me with a fairly large berm of lawn debris, which needed to somehow be consolidated or dealt with in some way. This was mostly because we let the leaves pile up more than we should have – almost completely covering most of the lawn. We have a burn ban here in E. Tennessee, so we wound up raking the piles into the woods next to where we dumped the piles. We have 1.3 acres, about half of which is woods, and the rest is lawn (with some significant slopes). The trees in the woods are currently bare, and all their leaves seemed to gravitate onto the lawn, which was why we got this sweeper. It seemed like returning the fallen leaves to the woods was poetic payback, LOL.Final thoughts – After getting past the assembly and learning curve for use, this sweeper works fairly well; not spectacular in my application, but MUCH better than manually raking, and superior to just mulching (which requires numerous passes in thick leaves). The lawn is (mostly) cleared of dead leaves; I’m pretty sure that if we hadn’t let them pile up so high the process would have been easier & more effective. Next time we’ll be more proactive, & probably have better results with less effort.So I’m giving the benefit of the doubt to Vevor, and rating at 4 stars. They gotta learn to label their hardware better though, and expand on those bag assembly instructions.