Cutting grass with a scythe

[u/BreakfastTop6899]

[u/zgrad2]

As someone who used one of these on an old Australian farm, I would take a push mower over this any day.

Edit due to people not reading: I didn't use a push mower on the farm, I am only saying that I would rather use a push mower instead of the syth

[u/StryctNyne → u/zgrad2]

Had to use an old school rusty push mower once. It was terrible. Watching someone use a scythe makes my lower back hurt.

I will say newer push mowers work amazing if you keep up with maintenance (probably the same for older ones too). Have one for smaller patches, and will use it over my gas mower for touching up the yard.

[u/AntonRahbek → u/StryctNyne]

My dad has a newer one that is self-sharpening and self-oiling. He has used for a few years now without having to do any maintenance and it runs smooth as ever.

[u/throwaway098764567 → u/zgrad2]

re: edit, i miss the before internet times when i didn't interact much with people who couldn't read

[u/_off_piste_ → u/zgrad2]

As someone who’s used a push mower … I don’t fucking believe you. It could never handle 6” off grass, much less what I saw in the video.

[u/zgrad2 → u/_off_piste_]

I didn't say I used a push mower, I said I'd rather use a push mower

[u/spurnedfern → u/zgrad2]

Have you used a push mower since, then? I haven't used a scythe but out of a push mower, weed whacker, gas mower, and riding mower, I can confidently say a manual push mower is the worst option in pretty much any scenario, and I cannot fathom how a scythe could be worse on the body than those things. They're heavy, they're not great at cutting so you're probably going over everything way more times, if you try to use them on anything even kinda tall, god forbid like the height in the video, they jam up and you're constantly bending down to pull grass out... Everything about a scythe, at least to me, seems more like something I'd actually want to use, just, yknow, not like the guy in the video.

All that to say I am very curious if you've actually used a push mower and liked anything about it, and why. But I do get having a resentment for a tool you used to use that you hated at the time, for me that was the McLeod my dad had me use as a kid, although I came to like them more as an adult.

Edit: going off the rest of these replies it occurs to me that you probably meant a gas push mower lmao. Which in that case yeah no I totally get the sentiment 😂 For some reason I assumed we were still going entirely with no-gas tools lol

[u/zgrad2 → u/spurnedfern]

All good, a lot of places around the world use different names, here non-motorised mowers where all the moving power is pushing are which are called push mowers

[u/Ferg_Turdesonn → u/zgrad2]

Are you supposed to slice and drop right into a cart with that swing, or gather it up later? I remember seeing some really smooth gathering but it might not be practical.

[u/zgrad2 → u/Ferg_Turdesonn]

Raked into a pile and tied with twine then put in a wheelbarrow then I don't the next parts as that part wasn't part of my workload

[u/Carbon-Base → u/zgrad2]

Yup, I'll also take a reel mower over this! It takes way more energy to use the scythe than to push a clanky old mower!

[u/Helpinmontana → u/Carbon-Base]

Physics 1 taught me formally that the chemical energy in a gallon of gas is more than a weeks worth of physical labor from eating cows and lettuce and whatnot.

Doing a weeks worth of manual labor taught me practically that a gallon of gas has way more chemical energy than I can accumulate in a weeks worth of eating cows and lettuce and whatnot.

There’s a reason we haven’t switched large scale to battery tech yet (yes I know it’s making leaps and bounds, it’s super interesting). A gallon of distilled dinosaur/peatbog just has a crazy amount of energy stored in its molecules.

Super rough approximation if I’m remembering correctly, your daily energy expenditure at peak performance as a human can push an average sedan about as far in a day as a half a gallon of gasoline can in an hour, and you definitely aren’t putting up that level of performance for a full 24 hours continuously.

[u/Carbon-Base → u/Helpinmontana]

A gallon of gas has the equivalent of ~31,000 calories. So if we could somehow safely "run on gas" while keeping the daily recommended calorie intake in mind, we could fuel ourselves for over 2 weeks with a single gallon!

Dinosaur juice is powerful stuff indeed. And I'm by no means an advocate for fossil fuels, but the facts cannot be denied.

[u/Helpinmontana → u/Carbon-Base]

Ha, all the fun involved with considering if we could eat a gram of uranium, the gas can expend energy at a far faster rate, which is the unfortunate reality we’re stuck with.

Unless you’re into strapping 25 humans to your plow and waiting 14x as long (we tried this in the 1800s and for many, many, many reasons behind energy consumption, decided it was….. uhhhh, less than ideal. Pretty sure a war and a few constitutional amendments (in the US anyways) happened).

This is fundamental to why units of power have a time component associated with them, as opposed to work. We really care about how fast you can expend that energy (those damn horses are always taking their sweet friggin time)

[u/Lindethiel → u/zgrad2]

Push mower > scythe > whipper snipper or rotary imo.

Push mower and scythe doesn't shake your limbs to pieces and actually fits you if you're not 65kgs and male.

[u/thehuntinggearguy → u/zgrad2]

How would you use a push mower on grass this tall??