Choosing a Scythe Mower
When you see a glowing emerald green lawn with prominent stripes, it’s a fair bet that it was cut using a cylinder lawnmower. This is because of the unique action of a cylinder mower - as the cylinder rotates, the grass blades are forced up between the rotating cylinder and a straight cutting blade, giving a clean scissor-like cut.
Of course this quality of cut is only possible on a flat and regular lawn. If yours is bumpy or uneven, has steep slopes or has more than one quality of grass so that some areas have fine growth and others have coarse, often tuftier, growth, a cylinder mower will struggle to cut well and a rotary mower may be a better choice for you.
Cylinder mowers come with three main types of power source: petrol, electric and battery, excluding the traditional source – man power! Push cylinder mowers have two great advantages – they are silent in operation and they give the person using them an excellent work out. Petrol cylinder mowers are the most powerful and they are free from electric cords but they can be heavy, difficult to start and require regular maintenance and particular care when put away for winter. Electric cylinder lawn mowers are better suited to smaller lawns as they are lighter and require less maintenance, but they can have a less powerful cut than petrol models. Battery cylinder lawn mowers are suitable for very small lawns only, but are ideal for those who want to keep a pocket handkerchief lawn in perfect condition.
Lawn size also matters: a 12 to 16 inch cutting cylinder is the correct size for an average lawn because a smaller cylinder increases the time spent cutting the lawn while a larger one can reduce manoeuvrability and prevent good turns. The number of blades matters too - 5 blades is the common number on less expensive models and is quite adequate for an average lawn, while 8 to 10 blades give a superb finish but may be excessive for a weekend gardener.
Petrol cylinder mowers are the crème de la crème of lawn work. Rover cylinder mower courtesy of www.gardening-tools-direct.co.uk
Here at BlueWorldGardener we have the largest collection of Lawn Mowers on the internet.
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