Late on Parade BEags. The Teetering Towers trusty black orb performed for the first time this (calendar) year on Easter Sunday, when it fed 3 generations of Teeters - well, the tinies weren't into steaks just yet, but enjoyed the garlic mushrooms.

I even - Weber forgive me - grilled some veggie sausages for the herbivorous Junior Daughter. :yuk:

Of course, it was wheeled out for the now traditional Turkey BBQ on 25th December .... :ok:

A Flymo ...

Good God BEagle ... A 'device' such as that is far too close on the evolutionary scale to those other 'things' that beat the laws of physics in to submission to get airborne ... How could you ;)

(In a slight misquote of an old adage)

To fly is human, to hover is divine.

The Flymo knows its place as a hovercraft - the rotating part is close to the surface and cannot be confused with those awful clattering things which are so hideously ugly that the Earth repels them from its surface.

If the earth did not repel a Flymo it would not work, would it? Rather similar to a helicopter one might think.

When in a hole ................

Go on, don't rise to the bait. Grit your tooth.

:D l;ss;ds;d ';[; '[';ds d;'dwl;w

A "flymo"? I cannot imagine what that might be. A homosexual in an airliner?

That would add a new dimension to performing a barrel role....:mad:

Gentlemen ... We should all have one of these :}

A well executed series of 'Wingovers' after each pass should give one the desired Wimbledon Stripes :ok:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=kNWfqVWC2KI

Coff

I trust that's a charcoal-powered flying lawn mower, Coff.

Hmm, I never did like stripy lawns. Always reminded me of the sort of thing you'd seen in an ATCO catalogue of the 'lashings of ginger beer' era of the 1950s, with Father (not 'Dad' in those days!) in his tweed suit puffing away on his pipe whilst mowing happily away. Mother in a deck chair in a sun dress with a glass of said ginger beer, with the rosy-cheeked son in his Viyella shirt, tie, sleeveless pullover and grey flannel shorts and pig-tailed daughter in a pinafore dress. The sort of kids you'd see in a Hornby Dublo catalogue - except, of course, for the girl. Girls had dolls, not train sets - such gender stereotyping was the norm in those days.

Petrol-powered motor mowers of those days all shared a traditional British characteristic - they were absolute buggers to start. Usually because they needed decoking, thanks to the wrong oil:fuel ratio in their diets. To keep you on your toes, they would often kick back if they had starting handles, or catch you on the shins if fitted with kick starts. Once underway they were reasonably reliable though and cylinder mowers could be persuaded to produce those infamous Wembley stripes.

But for sheer malevolent brutality, the daddy of them all was the infamous 'Allen Scythe', a device which can only have been designed by a psychopath. It resembled a small howitzer, but without the gun. It had 2 large wheels, only one of which was driven as a differential would only have been something else to go wrong and was powered by a 150cc Villiers 2-stroke, which incorporated the traditional British starting reluctance until the rope wrapped around the flywheel had been yanked sufficiently for the engine to tire of the game and start with clouds of blue smoke. A clutch disengaged the wheel, but the brute had a pair of scissor-action inter-meshing teeth on a 3 foot wide blade at the front - which were always driven whenever the engine was running....

The Allen Scythe was assembled by people to whom 'precision' was something of an unknown concept. To get round this, they recommended that the brutes should be serviced annually, advice which few owners would heed. With time, vibration and indifferent ownership would add an extra dimension of fun to Allen Scythe operation, entirely due to the clutch. A slot in the clutch lever was supposed to hold the thing out of drive by engaging on a short ratchet device which poked down through the slot. In theory you pulled up on the clutch lever and the ratchet held it in place. But the ratchet teeth soon became worn and the various joints in the linkage became sloppy. So often the vibration of the engine would cause the ratchet to let go when you were least expecting it and the device would charge forward to bury its fangs in whatever was in front of it! Lesson No.1 - never stand in front of an Allen Scythe if the engine is running! But even more fun was that the slop in the linkage was sufficient for the ratchet to move out of its slot, so that when you pulled the lever it would jam against the ratchet and you had to aim the brute at something safe before stopping it by the cut-off - which merely shorted the plug to earth.... Lesson No.2 - declutch early!

All this made the starting ritual most entertaining and it was guaranteed to attract a small crowd of spectators, who would wisely stand well clear. Turn on the petrol tap, tickle the carburettor, apply the choke, set the throttle on the left handle and heave away on the pull starter, whilst holding the clutch lever up. When it eventually fired, you had to release the choke with one hand, wiggle the throttle with the other to keep it going and hold the clutch lever with your third hand.... Wheel speed was directly proportional to throttle setting, so once it was going you aimed it in a safe direction and cautiously let out the clutch - which was somewhat binary 'all or nothing' in nature. Often it would set off at quite a surprisingly brisk pace, much to the amusement of the spectators, as the operator clung on for dear life!

Doubtless elf 'n safety would use the Allen Scythe as a classic example of 'How Not To' - whereas all I have to do with the Flymo is plug it in and avoid running over the cable. Much less terrifying than wrestling with an Allen Scythe possessed of diabolic intent!

But the sun is out; even though the weather-guessers have arranged for an unpleasantly cold easterly breeze, the Black Orb will be performing again this evening!

I remember the local council workers using them when I was a kid. Lethal looking bits of kit ISTR

Woody42, the version in that clip seems to be a slightly later model than the infernal device I knew. For one thing, it has a proper moulded plug cap, rather than the screw top plug I knew....

The problem with the screw top plug was that tall greenery would fall on it after being chopped down, efficiently shorting the exposed plug top to earth thereby stopping the engine. Which was almost impossible to restart if hot.

Back in the early '70s, my late father borrowed an Allen Scythe to tackle the triffids in our orchard.

We should have known better.

After it had been unloaded, the first time he started it, it lunged forward in the traditional manner, to take a bite out of the can of petrol/oil mix which had been delivered with it, causing the entire contents to escape.

The following day was a Sunday. Being an idle student down from university for the vacation, I was in bed listening to my father's colourful vocabulary whilst he was triffid-killing in the orchard. We lived in the Old Rectory right next to the local god-shop and I could clearly (and somewhat guiltily) hear the good folk of the congregation happily singing away. At the end of one hymn, they'd just got to the 'amen' at the precise moment the Allen Scythe decided it would stop its engine after a dead triffid fell on the plug..... Unfortunately the moment of holy silence in the god-shop between the hymn and the vicar resuming the service was punctuated by a yell of "YOU BASTARD THING!" from the orchard. I lay giggling like an idiot, in the sure knowledge that if I could hear both my father and the congregation, then they could probably hear him as well...

Brilliant BEagle - a lovely dissertation on the superiority of British engineering!

Similar to Pommy motor-cycles of the era. I could never figure out why the foot-brake was the same side as the clutch and the gears were the same side as the front-brake (hand-brake on the throttle stem).

These days there are all sorts of warnings by the nanny state to protect idiots from themselves. Given the total illogicality of the British HMI of the day, surely something like 'do not operate this machine if you drink VB' would have been appropriate!

Gas still sucks and I have just cocooned the old girl after her 30th year of faithful service. She'll be back as good as gold after we suffer through another freezing winter.

Indeed they were!

Here's another clip of the version I remember - complete with the exposed plug top.




If you weren't careful, when you operated the shorting device to stop it, the HT electrics would take the path to earth through the operator - another endearing characteristic of the psychopathic brute!

In this clip, the operator has cheated and built himself an external electric starter, which looks almost as lethal as the brute itself:


The shorting effect caused by wet greenery falling on the plug is also seen - as is the device's enthusiasm for finding a location with minimum potential energy, from which it eventually emerges with drooling fangs, taking the operator for a brisk walk. He can also be seen practising the 'Allen Scythe tug-o-war' without declutching first - invariably the brute would win and bury itself deeper in the undergrowth!

A truly diabolical device, the Allen Scythe.

Still, last night's performance of the Black Orb was up to spec.!

BEagle,

I had a Qualcast Royal which was two years older than my mother! It was also equipped with a Villiers 2 Stroke engine with a starting handle and a Golden Lodge 2-piece spark plug. It was a complete sod to start but when it finally screamed into life I would have to sprint behind it to stay up with it. I could do the back garden at our old Type IV at Manby in about 7 minutes which left me blowing like a Grand-National winner. It's cast-iron sides and general over-engineeredness made it a complete swine to load into the car/trailer and after it tore my thumbnail off I donated it to my Uncle. Happy memories!:ok:

ABS

What about those incredible tiny things with two wheels, cylinder-cut, wooden shaft and T bar handle and push-power only?.

Those bastards only came out, I swear, for Bob-a Job week, so that the sadists could sit in the garden and watch poor little LB struggling with foot-high grass with embedded dog****.

And only a Bob at the end of it.

The experience made the person I am ................

Those of us who were unlucky enough to be misemployed as slaves during Bob-a-Job week will undoubtedly recall that it invariably coincided with the time that weeds appeared in peoples' gardens.....

Weeding some old bat's front garden (that isn't a euphemism, by the way...) for a mere 1/- for the scouts' funds was hardly fair. But there were other abuses (not of the Jimmy Savile kind) as well - taking a nasty little fox terrier for a walk, for example. The little bastard kept biting my ankles, so I let it off its lead - whereupon it buggered off over the far horizon and took ages to capture using the Spam from my lunch sandwich as bait...... "He did have a nice long walk", the owner commented later, "so let me give you 1/6d instead...." :(