Electric Bike lawnmower still needs refinement

mikebikerad

mikebikerad

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My buddy gave me his old push mower after we saw a video of a regular pedal bike with a push mower attached to the front, naturally we knew what need to happen next! :twisted:

After riding it around for over an hour yesterday, we have come to the conclusion that the front mounted push mower cuts the grass awesome in a straight line but turning is nearly impossible because the straight axle turning affect basically tips the bike over when you turn the bars. Interestingly enough if you turn the wrong direction but lean real hard in the direction you want to turn it works best by getting the mower up on one wheel, but it is still hard to turn less than a ~30 foot circle.

A weighted trailer seems like an obvious next step solution

Any other mind blowing solutions or similar project people have worked on?

Here is the video...... and there are more pics on my Facebook(link below)

[youtube]eRnDAaU2woQ [/youtube]

0804130736b.jpg
 
That's the coolest thing I have seen a in a looonng time!!

Just needs a deflector for those clippings, man this could cut my lawnmowing time down to like 5 minutes! And I could do it silently at night. Awesomeness!
 
That's the coolest thing I have seen a in a looonng time!!

Just needs a deflector for those clippings, man this could cut my lawnmowing time down to like 5 minutes! And I could do it silently at night. Awesomeness!
 
I love the idea of reinventing the wheel, sadly many versions come up bad, oh well. Don't be discourage.

The solution is rather simple and already here, electric lawns mowers aren't new. I have used a plug in lawn mower for a very long time. Some people have bought battery powered lawn mowers and replaced the pack they included with LIPO, a123 or something. I don't know if there is much for electric mowers that have wheels that push the mower as well, but I bet you could setup something like a 16" direct drive hub on the rear (slow slow winding if possible or program the controller with a slow throttle, or both).
 
Bring on the zombie apocalypse! :mrgreen:
 
mikebikerad said:
A weighted trailer seems like an obvious next step solution

Any other mind blowing solutions or similar project people have worked on?
Click to expand...

Someone converted their old ride-on mower to electric, ditched the cutting deck and used it as a mini tractor to tow a long cylinder mower. There was video of it on here somewhere, I will see if I can find the link.

EDIT: few different ones here http://endless-sphere.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=50784

If you want to keep it up front then I imagine you'd need to fit a bearing so one wheel is isolated from the axle/blades to allow it to turn in a smaller radius?
 
Thanks everyone! :mrgreen: Zombies and Raccoon be warned!

The setup in this video would be perfect to tow behind a torquey e-bike with a tow hitch. thanks for the link jateureka. Make a custom mount that can either mount to a BOB trailer for store runs or a big wide reel mower for yardcare. You could do it all with a single e-bike and some quick tractor like attachments. This is a job for a Fat Tire bike
[youtube]vgQniLh9fEc[/youtube]
 
Fun but ineffective. You are getting a skip cut because the back of the reel bounces when you go fast. Some weight on it would help, but it will still tend to balk at running that fast across the ground.

It's just limited by the way a friction reel works, plus the number of blades. Faster mowing friction reels do exist for pulling behind a tractor, but they are large, heavy, and expensive. They have more blades on the reel, so each cut is still a small bite of grass.

What would be great is an easy way to make a typical inexpensive reel mower into a power driven reel. Then pushing it would be very easy, with a motor turning the reel at high speed. Power reel mowers exist, but they tend to cost a lot.

Meanwhile, with what you have, you just need a really slow ground speed, like a chain drive in the lowest gear, so you can just cruise with that mower much slower. Towing the reel should work better, at least for turns.
 
Combining a few of these inexpensive push mowers into one pull behind assembly or converting a hitch mounted rotary motor like in the above video to attach to seatpost or dropouts would solve all these problems.
 
Yep, but you might still find some problems with converting them to pull. They are made to be light, and stay down by your pushing force. When you pull a reel, it has to be heavy to maintain traction, not bounce too much, etc.

Then to mow fast, you need a reel with a lot more blades. If you pull ordinary reels, they will still have to go slower, the speed they were designed for. That slow will be hard on the bike, of course.
 
Good points.

The slow speeds constant load would kill any hub motor without temp sensing. To reach the target specs for a bad ass e-bike mower trailer we could just re purpose the blades from a reel mower and make a custom gear reduction so 10 mph on e-bike made the blades spin at original walking speeds. Weight over the blades could be accomplished with an off-board battery pack. The grass seemed to cut fine at 10-12 mph, the only problem, like you described, was when it starts to hop because the way it was mounted. Although the speed is not optimized it seemed to make really even clean cuts even when moving pretty quickly.
 
If you want to keep it friction drive pull behind, might a damped spring with slight down pressure help, like a rubber bungie?

BTW, I have a cheapo Task Force push reel mower and it worked fine until the wheel axle rivet got loose. That caused a cracked metal drive gear and handle piece that were both replaced while under warranty. I didn't figure out that the axle rivet had come loose until after the warranty had expired. Anyway, be mindful of that weak spot in the design of these cheapos. I think I'll probably devise some sort of thread-in bolt to replace the rivet and then ditch the friction drive for electric spin.
 
The V3 cycle analyst needs a mode for Wh/Acre haha, where instead of entering wheel diameter you enter the width of your cutting apparatus.
 
mikebikerad said:
The V3 cycle analyst needs a mode for Wh/Acre haha, where instead of entering wheel diameter you enter the width of your cutting apparatus.
Click to expand...


LMAO! That is priceless! :)

Tommy L sends....
mosh.gif
 
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