The Design Part 1

Now that I had this crazy idea to mow the lawn with my bike, where to begin? A quick search on the internet revealed that this concept inspired many other bike loving folks. Replace the front wheel with a reel mower and done! Many videos on the internet shows this design doing a great job at cutting the grass with clipping flying everywhere. 

There were two problems with this design.
One. It was a unitasker.  Taken from Alton Brown's, my favorite Food Network chef/scientist,  playbook-these devices were dedicated lawn care apparatuses. In addition to sacrificing a complete bike to make this work, you ended up with a dedicated machine that just mowed the lawn.  I tend to collect things* and the last thing I wanted was an unusable bike mower that would take up space and rust away.

Two. You couldn't steer the contraption. Or at least you couldn't steer it very well. A discussion among other bikers revealed the challenge using this design. With two wheels up front, if the turning axis wasn't exactly perpendicular with the ground, one wheel would tend to rise up and the other wheel would drive itself down into the ground. I re-watched all the videos and these mowers never turn.  Certainly, one could get this design to work, but it would require a lot more engineering to have functional steering.

So I came up with my first design requirement. 

I should be able to connect and disconnect the mower to any of my standard bikes with relative ease.

This made me think of a trailer. I've towed a bike trailer with 80-90 pounds of kiddo weight, so I knew it was a plausible feat.

Of course, people told me this wouldn't work.  Not having any experience mowing with a reel mower, I had no idea how hard one had to push or how much traction the the wheels on the reel mower required to turn the blades.

Awesome trike mid-mount design

Discussion and ideas flowed from front mount turning designs to a mid mount. While mounting in the middle could solve the steerability issue, there were a whole host of other problems that arose including pedal placement.  This recumbent trike design looks awesome, but in addition to being a unitasker, it looked super expensive to build and takes up way too much space.

First Reel Mower courtesy of my neighbors

In the past, I have typically kept quiet about my ideas and "worked" on them in secret. This often meant I would day dream and then think about it some more.  Realizing that socializing my plans  often lead to better ideas, I started talking about this concept to my non-biking group. And that' when the first break through happen. At our bus stop, my neighbor mentioned I could have their old reel mower that they never used, as the  husband abandoned the practice since the mower was easily stopped by small branches or twigs. So I took their mower, but was troubled by the idea that a small branch or even worse-a twig, could jam up the mower.


We were coming out of a seriously cold and snowy East Coast winter, so I had to wait a few weeks before the grass was tall enough to try the mower. Surprisingly easier than I had expected, this was probably due to the sparsely grown grass. I renewed my confidence about a trailer design.

Two major events happened next. One, a fellow mountain biker, John Jacob, offered to help out with the project.  This was a huge victory because he has ninja welding and mechanical skills. Second, in my research of reel mowers,  I found the king of reel mowers: the Fiskar's StaySharp Max Reel Mower. At that moment, I had visions of biking through open fields with grass clippings flying around.

I hate mowing the lawn.

I hate mowing the lawn. Grass makes me sneeze. Half burnt gasoline and oil makes me vomit. When I mow the lawn, the toxic odor makes me sneeze and vomit. And yet, being a frugal home owner, I felt obligated to mow my lawn. Isn't that the American dream? A wife, two kids, house, and the privilege maintaining a well manicured patch of fresh green real estate. So for 5 years after buying our first house, I toiled behind a gas powered lawn mower, maintaining the image of the American Dream.

And then my wife tricked me. A year after our second child was born, I complained how mowing the lawn took precious time away from me and the kids. Vulnerable and feeble minded from sleep deprivation, I agreed to her contracting some local students who would mow our lawn for an incredible bargain of 25 dollars a shot. Wow, the American Dream just got easier. I can pay someone to perform a chore that made me sick and I got to spend more quality time with the kids for just 25 bucks a pop. Win win right? This was the easier path to travel, but my frugality still tugged on my conscience.

The years moved on. We upgraded mortgages which came with an even larger plot of green real estate to tend. 25 dollars a mow became 30 which soon became 40. Over the course of 7 years at an average of 16 mows a season at an average cost of 30 dollars, this translates into over 3 thousand dollars. This was clearly a luxury in the Mah household. Mean while, the "free time" spent with the kids was soon occupied by a new extra curricular activity.

I started taking Brazillian Jiu Jitsu lessons. As with anything I love to do, I became very obsessed with BJJ and was attending classes 3 to 4 times a week. Classes were often in the evening so, I would would miss or rush through dinner to attend class. I frequently  stayed late and miss putting the kids to bed.

Keeping this schedule up for over several years, it dawned upon me that my kids were growing up without me. Yes, some of the "free time" gained by having a lawn service, was now completely consumed and surpassed by BJJ. I was prioritizing BJJ over time with my kids. And so I stopped. Giving up BJJ, I went to sport that allowed a more flexible schedule with my family. Mountain biking.

Actually, I didn't just get into mountain biking. I was sucked into a middle age, neighborhood biking cult. I soon found myself tearing up trails in our local park, competing in races, night riding, and culminating into a crazy 100 mile solo mountain bike ride. While I had progressed quite a bit in my year long biking endeavor, I was determined to find additional ways to level up. A Tim Ferris fan, was there a way I could "hack" my bike training?

So how to spend more time on the bike, still be with the kids, and do this without spending more money? In some rare moment I envisioned myself mowing the lawn with my bike. Many birds could fall with this one stone if it worked. And problems associated with mowing the lawn would be eliminated. I would no longer sneeze, since the adrenaline from biking acts as a natural anti histamine. Biking eliminates the need for gas or oil. Given the ultra quiet nature of the bike and mower, it would be possible to mow my lawn at ANY time of the day  . . . or night.

And thus began the journey of building a human powered bike mower.