Tell me about petrol mowers:

[andrew e]

Righto, as the new gaff has too much lawn to be pissing around with extention leads, my trusty bulletproof Qualqast hover is being relegated to the back of the shed. I NEED OMG POWAR MOWAR* I'm buying new because years of expirence tells me all used powered plant is loads of money/knackered/needing a special £87.45p diaphragm.

 

So Honda or Hayter?

 

Husqvarna wildcard (are there different qualities of these @ Bosch still?)

 

Mountfield are just a badge on shite now, no?

 

Feel free to correct me/point me in a good direction. I'm happy to spend £500 on something I can mow with till I'm dead

[alf892]

I have one you can have for free.........in running order. It is a Qualcast something that used to be a Suffolk Punch and has an 18 inch (cylinder) cut. Leaves nice stripes.

 

If new is really for you then Hayter are pretty good. I inheritated a 3 year old one about 5 years ago and had no bother.

[Guest]

Honda.

[seacow]

I have a Toro that I brought back from the States - I think it has a Briggs & Straton engine - I abuse and neglect it and it just keeps going! I was going to service it this year but the grass grew and I ran out time - started first time!

[dollywobbler]

Our mower has a Briggs and Stratton motor. I had it serviced in 2004 and it ran so badly afterwards that I've never done anything to it since. Runs better now than it did then...

[oman5]

definitely worth spending a bit more for a quality one. I had a Tecumseh mower and while the engine was reliable enough, longer grass would easily stall it, the carb was shite and the pull start broke very quickly. get a self propelled too.

[Formula Autos]

I've got a self-propelled Honda Izy, and never had any issues with it*. I've now got a lawn the size of most people's patio (I brought it from my old house which had a massive back garden). Keeping it is madness really, as it's not necessary for a garden so small, but it just keeps going. The deck/main body's rusted a bit, but the metal's plenty thick enough that the corrosion won't be an issue for many years, even if it's left untouched. Hassle-free mowing.

 

*Well, there was an issue of cat shit causing the belt to the propelling mechanism to slip, necessitating a particularly disgusting strip down and rebuild of this part of the mower. Particularly galling as I don't even have a cat, and it was a neighbour's cat that kept using our back lawn as a toilet. Can't do much about that though.

[retrogeezer]

Yes, most Mountfield ones are just crap ones from the GGP group in Italy and have awful chinese engines now. They really do just fall apart, not good when you have spent nearly £300 on one.

 

Some cheaper DIY stores ones are better, just look for the ones with Briggs & Stratton engines and you should be o.k. Some people prefer steel decked ones but they do rust and the plastic decked one I have has been great.

[lovejoy]

Anything with a Briggs & Stratton engine fitted is "bulletproof", the only issues would be shite getting in the carb jets, and any mower with

a pull start "string" will eventually snap, the recoil spring does sometimes snap too, but quite rare.

I run a 40 yr-old 21" cut Murray that I took out from UK over 20 years ago, it had been used by another "autoshite lurker" for over 15 years in his line of duty as a "professional gardener", (Brusha Lawn Maintenance, New Forest division) and he was going to take it to the tip.....

It's still going - EVERYTHING is made from metal (American metal) whereas the $99 Amazon mower we bought (same 20"cut MTD) has loads

of crap plastic everywhere, including the fuel tank.... I don't see it lasting that long

 

I gave away to a Texan friend another 2-stroke Tecumseh mower that I could not resuscitate, but he is an aircraft engineer, and he got it

running again, just had to replace a (plastic) fuel tank, runs it with no silencer on his 1 acre plot !

Moral there is = go for something old, you WILL get better quality.

[willswitchengage]

A genuine exercise in NOT skimping on cost. My parents' quite small garden destroyed a Husqvarna in about a year. They've (or rather me when I visit) been using a Qualcast (both have been rotary) recently and it has in no way turned out to be the same rusty, flimsy piece of tosh. Both had Briggs engines, which were great. Beforehand we had a second-hand Mountfield which lasted for yonks until the engine seized.

 

Go electric if you can, my current house has Flymo's first ever mower and it's fantastic.

[Lankytim]

We have a no-make self-propelled mower, had it 6 years with little bother. I was using eazi-start to get it going some days until the spark plug shot out. The thread is stripped but it still works just about. I'd kill for an elderly rotary mower with a roller though!

[Lacquer Peel]

[DSdriver]

Moral there is = go for something old, you WILL get better quality.

 

 

A sad indictment of modern manufacturing where everything is controlled by accountants looking to spend as little as possible so they can get bigger bonuses. Also the reason I seem to be stuck in a timewarp with cars and boats from the seventies.

[andrew e]

Note fatter in real life, picture for display purposes, the value of grass can go UP as well as DOWN.

 

 

Well despite the fabulous advice offered here (and a free mower too! Autoshite FTW!), my phone went flat till half hour ago, so I wandered into the local Mower place blind (cranky, been there years, encyclopaedic knowledge). Had a Viking, Alko & Toro but not what I was after. The Hayter's and the Honda were left. Conscious that even though Mrs E will never mow anything, we tried the patented "shove it out the way to get to the back of the shed test" Hayter lost weighing the same as a wheelbarrow full of concrete (down to the roller). Had a nifty raising mechanism though, very nicely engineered and BRG too.

 

So the self propelled Honda won. It's an IZY 16", and shock horror EU made!!!!!!! Even worse its FRENCH So I signed on the dotted line and bought it there, without so much of an online comparison!

 

Got home and found it was about £30 cheaper on the internet. Except mine was built, full of petrol, test run/PDI'd and in my garden without waiting all day for a courier. A worthwhile trade off. Grumpy I could have had Wuvum's Twingo for another £50 and an £8 train fare...

[andrew e]

Let a goat live in it.

[Partridge]

I use a Honda at work, and it’s great. Parts can be pricey though. Older Mountfields are fine, and like Prima Perkins engines they go on and on even if they’re as rough as a badger’s arse. Don’t know about the new ones, but I’ve heard they’re a bit crap.

[Dick Cheeseburger]

I bought a nearly new (if you can call 5 years old nearly new!), unused Mountfield after the deck on my old Mountfield rotted to buggery. It's still got a Briggs motor, but a shit carb setup, with no manual throttle, but a crappy governor/ auto throttle setup, which is useless to be honest. Just stuck a new carb on it as the old one was screwed from being sat unused for 5 years. Runs better and starts easier now, but I'm fed up with not having a manual throttle and flimsy construction. Going HNoddda next time fo sho.

[Bren]

Whatever you do, buy a mower with a polycarbonate body - I skipped a qualcast with a briggs and stratton that was in good fettle because the body had rusted away despite being cleaned. A new body cost £200 + which pissed me off so much I went out a bought a bosch electric one.

 

No more qualcast for me.

[Disco Fever]

I use a 17" electric Bosch as a regular banger round the lawn. That gets no looking after except a bit of oil on the blade before it goes back in the shed. When the the mood takes me, I have a 17" Atco cylinder mower with Tecumseh motor which I ponce round the lawn behind like the prince of Twatville. That gets cleaned and Mr Sheened before it goes away and it lives in the garage under a dust sheet. The nice bit is that without too much fuss, you can take the blade head out and drop in a scarifier. Use of that involves a Sunday afternoon mostly on tickover as you empty the grass box again and again. And again.

[JohnDeere]

I have a Mountfield with a 160cc Honda lump, seems pretty bullet-proof so must predate Mountfield becoming crap. Bloke in mower shop told me the OHC Hondas don't like mucky oil. And then there's the John Deere sit-on with a V2 650-ish cc Briggs and Stratton, every so slightly more powerful than a 2CV, but not (quite) as fast.

[JohnDeere]

I have a Mountfield with a 160cc Honda lump, seems pretty bullet-proof so must predate Mountfield becoming crap. Bloke in mower shop told me the OHC Hondas don't like mucky oil. And then there's the John Deere sit-on with a V2 650-ish cc Briggs and Stratton, every so slightly more powerful than a 2CV, but not (quite) as fast.

[Magnificent Rustbucket]

I use a Honda 19" mower with a roller. I'm not sure of the exact model, but it looks similar to yours - if quite a bit older. We got it in about 2005-ish. It has been a decent machine which cuts the lawn reasonably well and copes with its large-ish size (for a suburban house) quite well. It replaced a Honda HR194 which was also a 19" mower, but was far better quality than the current mower. Honda's OHV mower engine used in the earlier machine is more powerful than the OHC too.

[Junkman]

Turns out there is something I know about petrol mowers my wife didn't.

 

She tried to mow the lawn today while I was at work, but couldn't get it started. So she borrowed the push mower from our neighbor.

I booked it under mower sitting outside unused all Winter and anticipated a weekend full of lawnmower tinkering ahead.

 

However, when I came home, I couldn't keep myself away from attempting to start it, and it started on the second pull, spitting smoke, leaves, spiders, beetles, mice, dinosaurs, rust, bolts... in the end my carbon footprint on the grass was about two feet long, before it settled for a calmly puttering tickover.

We then established that it does help a lot when one turns the go-go-juice tap on before trying to start it.