Conventional wisdom dictates that one lawn mower must be used by one person at a time; the idea of using three, or even five lawn mowers at the same time is a difficult one to grasp. Charles Grassley, a senator based in Des Moines, Iowa, decided to hitch two push mowers to the back of his ride on lawn mower in order to increase the cutting width to around six feet, thereby slashing the time it takes him to mow his large lawn.
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It isn’t the safest of set-ups and we certainly wouldn’t recommend it, as Mr Grassley had to disable to safety cut-off mechanism on the push mowers to make the whole rig work, but it certainly shows some ingenuity.
Perry McGregor, of Danville, Virginia, has taken this to the next level by hitching four push mowers to the back of his lawn tractor, meaning he can mow his six acre lawn in forty-five minutes with a few stops to refuel the push along mowers. Before he had created his mega-mower it would have taken half a day to finish the job. Again, this set up does require disabling the safety cut off mechanisms so is not recommended (ever heard of the Darwin Awards?!). McGregor has been tweaking this set up for fifteen years, encountering a lot of trial and error along the way especially with regards to the wheels on the push along mowers.
As a retired farmer and truck driver, Mr McGregor has the skills and experience with agricultural equipment to create this sort of set up; it is not something just anyone can put together in a day. Using his ingenuity he saw that the best way to speed up this chore was to increase the cutting area to a size that would normally be reserved for an agricultural sized tractor mower but without losing the agility of a smaller lawn mower.
When he is out cutting the grass the unconventional mower set up attracts a lot of attention, with people even pulling into his driveway to take pictures, but the attention is not a motivating factor for Mr McGregor. He was inspired to see if he could build such a contraption and is spurred on by the spirit of invention and the satisfaction he gets from each success in the development of his unusual lawn mower.
Mr McGregor really does have a lot of grass to cut, as on top of his own six acres he also mows lawns for elderly or disabled neighbours and church members, although not all those people have gardens large enough to warrant using his five-mower set up.
For those of us who need a wide mowing area but do not fancy welding several lawn mowers together there are some attachments available for lawn tractors and ride on mowers. A set of cylindrical cutting blades rigged in a two-three (or three-five) formation can be attached to the rear of a big machine and increases the cutting width without the safety risk of two or four petrol lawn mowers (with safety mechanisms disabled) welded to the back of a ride on mower. This attachment does the same job as the contraptions devised by Mr Grassley and Mr McGregor but without the years of tweaking, repairing and improving their home-made mowers. All three systems return the grass clippings back to the lawn; the technology to collect clippings with lawn mower set ups like these ones has not been invented yet, although we suspect both Mr Grassley and Mr McGregor are working on it.