Hi All
My trusty mountfield has expired after 15 years service so looking for a replacement before the weekend. Needs to be 18 inch cut, steel deck, hand propelled, with a big grass collector. Money's a bit tight at the moment so also needs to be cheap. I see screwfix are selling 'Victus' mowers at a good price:
TIA
Mark
Sheep. Big grass collector!
I would be seriously tempted to fix the Mountfield.
Modern mowers are relative crap.
Why a steel deck? My McCulloch has worked well as a mower but the deck is rusting away, I'd been thinking of looking for one with a plastic ar aluminium deck to avoid the rust problem.
NoSpam wrote in
Can't make any recommendation as regards its quality but I noticed that Makro have a JCB petrol self-propelled 46cm mower for £99.99 +VAT
Could only find the following to illustrate:
PeterMcC wrote in
Sorry - the link didn't work in the previous post:(
Try:
Engine is clapped plus too many other projects to put this on the list. So need to buy something...
Says £199 when I looked - has it gone up? :o)
Thus spake Bob Mannix ( snipped-for-privacy@mannix.org.uk) unto the assembled multitudes:
This £99.99 Champion mower at Focus DIY looks to more or less the same machine as the GGP I bought from them three years ago and which is still going strong:
I posted two weeks ago about the fuel tank on my GGP that was leaking. I fixed the leak with some Unibond epoxy plastic repair goo, and it's still OK now.
On hondas the steel deck is for the cheap models - the plastic one is actually pretty good. 10 years after getting our secondhand honda, I'm still impressed with it. Mostly because it starts easily - I used to hate B+S engines for that reason.
If you're near Glasgow, there's a pair on ebay I'd take a punt on.
cheers, clive
FWIW, the Champion chipper I bought for us and the (electric) mower I bought for my M-I-L are both still going strong after several years, so I wouldn't discount the "Champion" brand, even if it is cheap-as-chips "Made In China"(*) stuff.
(* Isn't everything, these days?)
Bob Mannix wrote in
No, sorry if it wasn't clear - the £99 offer is at Makro - they don't have individual products on their site so I posted the link to the Great Universal site as an illustration. That's what I meant when I said "Could only find the following to illustrate". 'pologies for any confusion.
I hate spending money on mowers. Even the expensive ones don't last long and aren't particularly well built. OTOH if you do want to splash out and buy the very best available then I can recommend a "Tortella" flail mower which is 1.8 metres wide, needs at leat a 55bhp tractor to power it and costs a fairly reasonable £800+VAT.
It won'd wear out any time soon, can give a bowling green finish if you desire, and will also mince things like logs up to 2 inches in diameter.
At the other end of the scale I just go for cheap crap, usually paying about £70 for a mower. I've recently retired a "Sovereign" 18in mower which was still in reasonable working order but I was getting tired of having to repaint the deck each year. I finally decided to ditch it because the "primer button" rotted and a replacement was only available by buying a new carburettor which would cost more than the mower was worth. It lasted for ten years and apart from a broken pull cord handle I had no problems with it.
The current model is a £90 "Power Devil" which is self-propelled and has a larger grass box than the Sovereign. It worked well for the last year and has come out of storage and started first time and tackled the overgrown lawn without a hickup.
The Power Devil looks identical to the Victus but it has the self-propelled thing and has a Briggs and Stratton engine instead of a no-name brand.
Ah. My bad (as the merkin's say).
Bob Mannix
Excellent! Any advance on £70. I wonder if Costco do mowers?
I believe they do, though I've found Costco getting a bit of the "Makro" syndrome where things look cheap on the face of it, but once you add VAT you can usually find stuff on-line at the same price or cheaper.
Beauty of Costco is they have a brilliant returns policy so if it's crap you can take it back and say it's just not suitable or of good enough for the job in hand.
(took back a digital camera after 6 months because the pictures were genuinely s**te)
on a side note, I often wonder how many of the retired mowers you see at the tip are actually truly dead rather than just needing a bit of petrol down the air inlet at the start of the season.
Cheers Pete
Have you checked your local tip? It's lawnmower season, and my local tip often has a fine selection of mowers in various states of disrepair. I bought a 20" Honda powered job ( broken handle ) and an 18" somethingorother with a 375 B&G motor on ( broken handle, again ).
Five quid each.
The B&G needed a bit of 3/4 steel tube to fix, the Honda needed the same plus the float chamber cleaning out.
Both had relatively fresh grass clippings stuck to the underside - which is nearly always a good bet for a bargain mower that's recently been working but is simply too much hassle for the average punter to fix.
Regards,
You are *very* lucky your local tip has the foresight to resell these items. The council for where I live has strict rules prohibiting anyone other than tip staff from removing dumped items for keeps. The crap inside your car virtually becomes their property the moment you drive in through the compound gates. :-(
I could get a job there I suppose and 'feast' on the spoils but the smells there are something else... and it's located right next door to a major frozen Pizza factory that supplied Waitrose etc... Oh yum :-|
All the tips local to me are run by private companies and have the duty to recycle as much as possible. That recycling includes gleaning stuff from the rubbish and selling it on. It's the first place to check for doors and other DIY stuff as well as metals and PC spares.
I only wish I could persuade them to put the PCs under cover. They treat books, CDs and LPs like gold dust but simply stack PCs on a rack in the open air.
HomeOwnersHub website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.