On Jun 28, 10:55 am, Ron Hardin wrote:
beecrofter wrote:
On Jun 28, 8:57 am, Ron Hardin wrote:
hobbes wrote:
Hi,
I have a slope lawn and I think this is just the gadget for solving
the problem. Sadly at 16,000 Euros, about $US 20,000 it is a bit
pricy. But it sure looks like fun.
What it is is a Kawasaki 17 hp mower hooked up to a 4wD mower base. It
is made in the Czech Republic in Europe. There is even a YouTube video
about it. And it is also radio
controlled so the operator is always safe. Tipping over of the mower
is O.K. because the operator can be up to 100 feet or more away. It
has a run time
of six hours and runs on regular gasoline. So unlike battery powered
machines it really has the power to mow stuff.
http://www.spider-cz.com/
Best, Mike.
Or get a scythe. http://www.scythesupply.com
It has to become a hobby though. I keep an acre mowed with a scythe,
a little each day.
An ``outfit'' will run you about $170. (snath, blade, stone, bar peen
hammer, larger anvil.) It will cost you about $1000 after you get
into it and get all the interesting blades, to get the perfect one
for each occasion. And of course you'll want extra snaths so you
don't have to swap blades so often just to cut over some uneven
terrain with a shorter blade, and so forth...
--
Ron Hardin
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
I'd imagine by now you have restored a few dead blunt blades to
cutting efficiency.
Would you explain the process.
I pound out a few now and again -but all I ever see are ones that have
been abused or blunted by repeated grinding without having been peined
for a long time. I am tempted to take them to the forge and then
quench the edge in some melon.
The European style scythes I use have soft steel blades (I think the American style
are hardened. The American are stamped out, the European are hammered.)
You stone-sharpen the European blades every 30 strokes or so, mowing a lawn,
to keep it sharp enough. It takes about 15 seconds, and it provides a rest
that factors into how hard you work between sharpenings, so it's not really
slowing you down.
Every couple of hours, you re-peen the edge, as you will have stoned away enough
so that you can't get a really sharp narrow-angle edge any longer. Peening
(with a bar-peen hammer and anvil) just amounts to repounding the edge so it's
thin again. The book has a hammer pattern of 4 hits working towards the edge, but
I've never seen how you can control where you hit closely enough to do that, because
you can't see where you hit. I just pound on and off the edge, as determined by sound.
Then restone lightly to get a really sharp razor edge again, and you're back in
business. (Peening hardens the soft steel edge, as you create a new edge, as well; a new
blade needs peening more often but quickly falls into a pattern of a certain hardness
preserving the edge better, without going so hard that you can't sharpen it.)
This will have no effect on an American blade. It may be that you have to grind them.
You stone away the upper edge only, by the way, and only go over the bottom to take off
the resulting burr. Alternating top and bottom lightly afterwards seems to give the best
edge cleaning-up.
--
Ron Hardin
On the internet, nobody knows you're a jerk.- Hide quoted text -
- Show quoted text -
I am finding moving metal by peining even on the Austrian made blades
to require quite a heavy hand.
Of course we are talking very blunt akin to " it was in my grandpa's
shed and I'd like to have it sharpened" condition.
All in all it's nothing compared to what people manage to do to a two
man saw, they can easily swallow up a half day of labor.