I want to buy a 'sickle bar mower', that's a mower like an Allen Scythe but, preferably, a more modern one. Can anyone suggest where I might look for reasonably priced seconddhand ones? New ones (brands are Alko and Solo) are around £500 and that's a little too pricey for me.
If I were you I would get an Allen scythe, they are everlasting.
At a farm sale they make about 30 -80 pounds.
mrcheerful
Unless you want it lightweight, go for the Allen scythe. eBay has them from time to time, or posting to uk.rec.engines.stationary would probably shake one out of the orchard.
Don't use an Allen scythe on sloping banks though - they're very top-heavy and dangerous to try and control. Dad lost his into the ditch once and we both stood there watching it thrashing away and waiting for it to run out of fuel - the unspoken subtext being "Well, why don't _you_ climb down past the bar and switch it off"
I left one ticking over and the clutch rod snapped , it reared up and headed towards me, very frightening.
Still the best machine though, can be painful to use if you are very tall as they were built for an older shorter generation.
mrcheerful
Yes, but apparently rather top heavy and unstable. I'm likely to use this on rough and sloping ground so something with a lower centre of gravity will be better if I can get one.
Exactly, I would buy a 'real' Allen Scythe except for this top heaviness which I have read about elsewhere. I want something a bit more manageable if I can get it.
I lost control of one on some bumpy ground and it went off and before I could stop it it had embedded one of the pointy bits in a brick wall. I refused to have anything to do with it after that.
Isn't the current fashion for wheeled and motorised giant strimmers with heavy duty nylon cutting line instead of a cutting bar, like these
Sam
I've seen one converted to use motorbike wheels. As the original wheels are cast iron disks and very tall, they're the main problem.
Yes. Although they won't cut through brambles and they fling gravel around. You cant strim alongside a road, but you can use a sickle bar.
I have a heavy duty strimmer and it's completely useless for clearing brambles and such. It also has a metal 'brush cutter' blade but I don't find that a particularly easy way to clear brambles either.
If you do a search for 'sickle bar mower' on Google you'll find lots of places that say that this type of mower is the best for clearing really rough, weedy ground.
Further to the above what prompted me (this time, I've thought about buying a sickle bar mower before) was that I used my just bought, very cheap, hedge trimmer to hack through a patch of brambles and it was very effective. A sickle bar mower is essentially a hedge trimmer mounted on driven wheels (costing about 20 times as much).
The teeth are a different shape. Hedgecutter teeth have a "notch" in the blade so that they catch the twig and shear it between them. Sickle bars have un-notched triangular teeth with a scissor action. Sickle bars aren't as good at cutting sticks, but they don't block up and stall if you overload them. Hedgecutters won't cut grass - they just mash it (and may manage to tear it apart, but it isn't neat).
Yes, OK, there are differences but fundamentally they have the same mechanism. The only reason for the huge difference in price is presumably that there is a mass market for hedge trimmers and only a niche market for sickle bar mowers (partly because everyone thinks rotary mowers and strimmers are the answer to everything).
As I said my very cheap hedge trimmer was very effective at clearing brambles, the only difficulty was that it's not really designed for ease of use close to the ground.
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