2014 Year in Review

A Story will go here . . . X

In the news

While I wanted to blog about this "in real time", the fact of the matter is that I am a slacker. . .
Here is an article that was published this summer and featured in the Baltimore Sun.

My neighbor ratted me out to my local newspaper. Nice write up. Yeah!
Check out the article below:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-county/catonsville/ph-ca-creative-resident-0625-20140708,0,453280.story

Who Should Buy This?

When I show people the mower-I either get an quizzical look as if I am crazy, or a dumbstruck "of course that makes sense" look. The funny observation is that my biking friends think its a great idea and their wives all want to actually buy one and mow the lawn.

So-who is this really for? Let's break this down into who it is for and who it is not for:

Who should buy one:

• Someone who loves bikes
• Want's who wants a great workout while being productive
• Does not want to fuss with gas powered contraptions 
• Wants the ability to mow the lawn at night without fear of disturbing the neighbors
• Wants to save money over the cost of gas powered contraptions
• Wants to level up on their biking skills and power

Who should not buy one:

• Wants an absolutely manicured lawn
• Have grass higher than 6 inches
• Has a non flowy non bike friendly lawn
• Has a seriously rough or steep lawn
• Has no gumption

The First Mow

Did it work? Check out the video . . .


Human powered designs from Jason M on Vimeo.


Suffice to say, I am very pleased with the results. Is this faster than push mowing the lawn? I have to get more accurate measurements to quantify this but here are a few observations:

1. Against a pure head to head race of walking the mower and riding the mower, the riding will win.
2. Riding the mower incurs more overlap, so it depends on your mowing route and biking accuracy to minimize overlap. Walking is much more precise in prevent overlap.
3. On a hill, I was significantly faster biking. I could not get the leverage pushing the mower uphill. Biking up hill, was just like cranking up a normal hill on a bike-albeit with more drag.

Stay tuned for quantifiable results!

The Design Part 2

After finding the perfect reel mower on internet, I began my search on Craigslist. There was no way I was going to pay retail to test out my ideas. Cheap and quick were my drivers.

Of course cheap and quick are often mutually exclusive.  After a few no responses and a few rejections from high priced sellers, I finally found someone after a few weeks of searching.  They were located in the small town of Dickysville, Baltimore. Ever been to Dickeysville? I hadn't, but discovered it is was a nice quaint town tucked under the right rib of Baltimore.

I meet a pleasant couple moving out west. They used the Fiskars for two year on their small plot of grass. It was well used, but for 70 bucks, I snagged it and ran.

With mower in hand, I was eager to test the performance. Would it be the grass chopping dream I had hoped?  Setting the Fiskars loose on my lawn, it was a thing of  . . . beauty. Easy to push and pleasant to hear, I sliced through the blades of grass with ease.  The fly wheel design kept the smooth flowing scissor blades rotating a few seconds after stopping, which was helpful in situations of maneuvering without much motion. The question still remained in my mind-could this still be actively towed and still cut?

Wanting to answer this question before we built an elaborate towing rig, my partner in crime, John, and I simply tried to pull the mower over grass. So we attached a strap to the mower and tried pulling it. It worked! Well-sort of. As we got into the taller grasses, the wheels started dragging when the blade become too clogged. We tested again with a weight on the back and it started cutting again. Proof of concept acheived. And so began the work to build a proper harness/frame for the mower.

How to build a bike trailer.

You figure building something like a bike trailer styled arm was pretty obvious. While John and myself have used many bike trailers, we both had fuzzy concepts on how a trailer arm should be shaped. Depending on how large or compact you made the arm figured into the bike's turning ability, wheel size support, and mounting options. To eliminate any ambiguity, we borrowed a friends Burley bike trailer.

I don't want to bore you with the mechanical points, 
You figure you attach the mower to the mount points and then build out an arm that attaches to the bike. For reference we borrowed a friends bike trailer. My bike trailer was on loan to my cousin, and John's.

It seems that for a hub mounted bike trailer, the arm should radiate from the center of the trailer and then back in towards the hub like the short two arms on the letter k.

The bend of the arm dictated how far right you could turn on the bike with out the wheel cutting into the arm. The more acute the angle, the wider range of movement your rear tire could swing during a turn. Of course the more acute the angle, the longer the arm needed to be and stronger the arm needed to be to handle the stress.

The trailer arm was ultimately built and John ingeniously recycled an old universal joint to act the trailer pivot point.  The mower was ready to go. It just needed to be tested . . .

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.