How much are you trimming? I may have a fringe opinion here, but I believe that all trimmers do a lot of damage to the flowers. Unless you are dealing with pounds at a time is hand trimming really such a chore? I harvest 4 plants at a time for 10-12 oz of good buds, before I count the trim and larf, and I maybe spend 4-5 hours trimming it. I think a few hours for months of better quality smoke is well worth it.
My approach to trimming is also probably a bit fringe. I only remove fan leaves and discard them, then I hang the plants until they reach the point where the stems bend, but do not crack. Then I take them down and cut off any larger leaf with resin glands. I leave the majority of the small sugar leaves on the buds when I cut them up for storage, I never shear off all the sugar leaves, just leave them mostly intact. This accomplishes a few things; it makes trimming a lot faster and easier, it's more gentle on the resin glands since you are not digging around in the bud with scissors, and as the sugar leaves dry they wrap around the bud and protect the more delicate flower structure from getting beat up during storage and handling, example bud pic attached.
My view is that we spend a lot of time, money and effort growing these plants and I want the flowers to be the best they can be. Going to all of this effort on a fairly small scale and then throwing them in a trimmer to get all tossed about and mangled just to save a little time at the cost of quality seems counter intuitive to me.
When I am ready to smoke them I simply pluck the sugar leaves off the buds as I transfer them from my cure jars to my stash jar. When I have a couple grams of sugar leaves saved up I dry sift them, or throw them into the next batch of bubble hash. If it was an extra frosty run then I often just end up leaving them on the buds. With a frosty strain and a good run I find that the smaller sugar leaves are just a frosted out as the rest of the flower structure anyway.
Happy growing!
