ELEY Hose Reel Cart with Wheels - Portable Heavy Duty Hose Reel and Garden Hose Holder, Great Addition to Gardening Accessories and Supplies

One step in the assembly can be REALLY TERRIBLE with the parts and instructions supplied. If you can get past that vexing, frustrating hump, it's a really great cart (so far) once assembled. But I would rate the assembly process for the cart itself only 3 STARS or even worse. Didn't want to knock the overall hose reel cart value down but the Eley company has a serious design/instruction problem at the point of the clamping handle assembly that attaches to the lower frame, holds the axle for the reel, and provides the handle mounts.With everything else about the cart so well-thought out, you have to wonder how the assembly of the clamp that holds the lower left and right supporting members of the chassis together could be so lame, or if it's just user error, how the instructions could allow the user to make the wrong choices at this critical step in assembly.The problem is that to affix the clamp to the left and right uprights rising up from the wheels two long hexagonal bolts are supplied. These are supposed to go through the clamp parts that fit over the lower frame uprights. Then each bolt is supposed to be threaded to a nut that fits into a recessed hexagonal hole in the plate that completes the clamping assembly for each upright..Ideally, the nut would just fit into the stamped hexagonal depression in the frame so that when you turned a bolt on the other side of the whole half-assembly, the nut would not turn allowing the bolt to screw in and tighten every thing up. Well, there are two big problems. First of all, the recess stamped in the clamp is big enough that the nut can turn freely and is not gripped by the sides of the recess. But there is not enough space to get any hex socket nut holder into the recess to hold the nut steady. Secondly, the nut itself has a built-in or pushed in rubber washer in the first part of its tap hole that faces the entry point of the bolt end into the nut (the beveled site of the nut). The intent is to provide friction to prevent the bolt from unthreading through vibration, etc., over years of use. This means it is very, very hard to thread the nut onto the bolt when the nut is put in the recessed hole because the washer is in the way. You don't want to screw up the threading and strip the bolt/nut threads! At this point in the assembly the lower chassis with wheels is pretty much assembled but the left and right verticals are flopping around with the relatively heavy clamp assembly sitting on top requiring one of your hands full-time to hold it in place as you try to get the bolt to go through and thread the nut with the opening obscured by the "rubber" washer. Having an assistant to help you hold things would make things a lot easier at this stage.I figured that there must be something I'm missing so I went to the Eley web site to watch the video on hose reel cart assembly. Would you believe that the 1043 cart assembly video on the web is out-of-date?! Incredible! The handle assembly that Mr. Joe Cool so deftly assembles all by himself in the video is NOT the one provided in the box that I just received and diagrammed in the otherwise excellent illustrated manual that comes in the box with the product.After much frustration, I finally got the bolts threaded. First, I just took each bolt and nut separately, put the nut on the bolt backwards so that the washer was at that far end of the nut and the bolt could get started on pure nut thread. Then as the bolt was progressively screwed into the nut, it could "ream" out the washer, threading it, and making it easier to thread in finally putting the whole clamp together with the nut the right way round (tapered bevel facing the inside of the stamped recessed nut hole).Secondly, I took a very small blade from an interchangeable screwdriver set and crammed it into the space between the nut and the recessed hole to prevent the nut from turning while trying to thread the bolt (the washer in the nut allows the bolt in threading to generate considerable torque against the nut, making it very hard with just your fingers to keep the nut from turning). Perhaps things would have been easier if I just put the nuts into the recessed hole with the beveled, washer side out to begin with but I always put anything that looks like a washer between the nut and the bolt-and when I took the clamp apart to mount on the lower frame, I didn't think to look which way round the nut was in the recess before I undid the bolt and the nut dropped out. The manual offers no advice as to which way round the nuts should go, there doesn't even appear to be a recessed space for the nut in the clamping plate depicted in the manual, and the nut depicted seems to have a flanged side facing the bolt and clamp! The manual should clearly depict the nuts actually shipped with the product and the proper orientation to use in attaching a nut in any situation where it can make a difference in assembly rather than make any part of assembly a puzzle for the user to figure out.Several further observations. I swear I really tightened up the lower front bumper support tube to the frame holding the wheels but after a whole afternoon of happily wheeling the cart to and fro about the yard, one of the nut/bolt combinations at that joint had already started to come loose. Another reviewer described a similar problem and suggested using lock washers as the ridges on the flanged side of the nuts used in this part of the assembly are very slight and don't seem to provide all that much of a nut-locking function. The wheels do have some play side-to-side to slide along their axles, too, as others have noted, but it's really not noticeable in wheeling the cart about..Lastly, when you open the box that you receive, open it lying flat on its side on the floor. Big pieces of molded plastic hold everything in place inside the box. But the plastic molding is just held in place by the surrounding box and not fastened together in any way. If you open the box standing vertically as lettered, the molding will fly apart as you pull the unit from the box and all large parts will clatter to the floor. There were several loose nuts in the box and the assembly video on the Eley web site warns you when you open the box to look out for any such small parts that may have come loose during shipping. For such an expensive item, Eley should figure out a way to prevent things from coming loose and the whole box from falling apart if you open it the wrong way.In spite of assembly snafu's, once assembled, it's a great cart. Easy to wheel around standing upright (I'm 6 ft tall). With the large wheels, easy to roll up the several inch lip of the back porch concrete slab onto the back porch proper. The hose brake is great at keeping the hose from unraveling as the cart is wheeled about. Although there is no tray or clamp to hold the end of the inlet feeder hose, it's easy enough to lay it in the V between the handles, lift up a bit of the garden hose on the reel to loop the inlet hose through and hold it in place and let the end of the inlet hose dangle a bit over the front end of the reel as you wheel the cart about. Although it's a great cart, the easiest way to reel up the hose, particularly if you have a lot of thick, heavy duty 5/8 in hose (only about 100' of that fits on the cart), is to manually pull the hose towards the cart with your hands while walking side to side in front of the cart, laying the hose out in a back-and-forth zig-zag pattern in front of the cart with the hose end ending up furthest away from the cart. Then you can easily reel all your hose onto the cart only pulling in a little section at a time rather than trying to pull the whole length of the hose through the yard using the reel, which is hard on the cart reel, hard on your wrist and forearm joints. Much easier on you and the cart to do the layout prep pattern first and the preparatory pulling helps empty any last bit of water out of the garden hose if you didn't succeed in thoroughly draining the hose to begin with. Less stress on the hose, too, as it's not tugging against it's full length as you twist it around the cart reel, easier to guide onto the reel with the hand not turning the reel.

Have you ever wondered why spending $300 to store your hose could change your life? In one word, Eley.My husband and I spent the first 19 years of our marriage buying plastic reels to store our garden hose. Every few years the reel would break and we would go online or to the hardware store and sigh loudly as we picked up another plastic garden hose reel, bring it home and struggle as we tried to use it to transport our hose from one side of our house to the other. The wheels would fall off, the bottom would crack and the hose would roll up and then quickly unroll as we were awkwardly pulling it across the yard. Honestly, I loathed any chore that required the garden hose.This year when my husband declared that we needed another hose reel he also proclaimed we would not be buying a plastic holder, but a reel with larger wheels and a better and easier handle. After a couple days of research on my end the answer was clear (and expensive) - Eley. We had a family meeting and decided that we could have purchased the Eley reel 10 years ago and probably saved ourselves $400 on top of the price of the Eley reel. We ordered the Eley reel and did not look back.When I tell you this garden hose reel is a joy to own, I am not kidding. My husband put it together and made a couple comments about how interesting it was because it was so well designed (he enjoys that sort of thing). I love getting our garden hose out now. I water our neighbors' new trees, I water plants I have never watered before and we have lived in this house for 19 years, I look for reasons to get the hose out because it is just so easy to do.The reel itself pulls with one hand and the hose is locked in so there is no chance that it is coming undone while moving around. When I need to pull more hose out, the the wheel turns with no effort and the hose glides toward me. When I'm finished watering and need to put the hose away, I simply turn the wheel with ONE HAND and the hose goes right back in its home, with no issues. The wheels handle all the lumps, bumps and curbs of our yard, driveway, and sidewalk like the Eley engineers came to our house and designed it especially for me.Is the Eley reel pricey? Yes, at first, but you won't have to buy another hose reel again which will make it less expensive and will probably change your life. Probably.