My morning oatmeal

I am cheap.

Well, more of a frugalist.

While I am not a complete disciple of Mr. Money Mustache, one interesting tid bit in his Spartan living is how he controls cost with food. He simply eats super cost effective products. While I still indulge my family with expensive high quality food products, I am also a fan of cost effective meals. A very big fan.

In college, I would often cook for myself some rice and stir fry the toughest, chewiest, piece of top round I could find? Why top round? For 3.49 a pound back then, it was one of the cheapest cuts of meat I could find. Was it tender? No. Was it tasty. You bet. Done.

A big fan of a large breakfast, I find myself wanting to 3 sunny side up eggs, bacon, and two pieces of toast with my mom's delicious strawberry jam. Of course, now that I have to drive to work, that luxury of enjoying a well cooked meal is gone due to time constraints.

So what do I do? I prepare a whole mess of oatmeal. Okay . . .  so how is this noteworthy?

In the way I cook it.

Okay-let me explain.

I am a big fan of steel cut oat oatmeal after discovering it from my favorite celebrity chef, Alton Brown. It's less processed, nuttier, and heartier than regular rolled oats. The downside with steel cut oatmeal, is that it takes quite a bit of time to cook. 20-30 minutes if you boiling and stirring. One could cook it overnight in a slow cooker, but I find the results to be soft and mushy. I like texture in my oatmeal.

Experimenting one night, I boiled a pot of water, turned off the stove, threw in the steel cut oats, placed a lid on, and walked away.  The darn thing boiled over with the residual heat and made a big mess on the stove.

So the next experiment I did the next few days was to let the pot cool for a few minutes before placing the lid. The next day, I had a properly textured oatmeal that simply need a quick reheat in the microwave.

With the exception of the reheating-I used the minimal amount of energy required to cook the oatmeal, since I allowed it to cook/simmer over night with the residual heat.

Brilliant right?

Let me know what you think.

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.