When he put his fingers right at the edges of the running mower, I gasped. Nobody should ever even get that close!
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I remember watching a 60 Minutes report on the dangers of lawn darts when I was a kid. It included an x-ray of a child’s skull with a lawn dart stuck in it, an image that has coincidentally stuck in my head ever since.
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This particular machine actually looked to be in excellent mechanical condition before the restoration. Eric notes several times that it looked like the mower had barely been run. I did enjoy the stripping/repainting process
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I’m surprised this works, I would think any downward thrust would flatten the grass and make it harder to cut, like a reverse flowbee…
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From that era, I bet it doesn’t have a safety kill-switch when the operator lets go of the handle.
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If you look at the underside of the contraption (31:05 in the video), it appears that there’s a fan above the blade that shoots air radially in a “sheet” that flows along the underside of the deck to the edges. That might reduce the grass-flattening, at least in the center of the path
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The oil filter is secured with a ball jar lid ring, or something very similar. That’s amazing to me.
I think that’s the air intake & filter, as it leads straight into the carb. He incorrectly captions it as the muffler.
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And then I misquoted the caption, after checking it twice because that didn’t look right to me. Success?
Which is to say, thank you for the correction.
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We had an electric flymo in the UK, it was light, super-easy to handle, and quiet!
I couldn’t find one when we moved to the USA, so I contacted the company and was told that many lawns in the US use grasses that are much coarser than what is typical in the UK where it is always raining. They were getting too many returns from people who found the flymow ineffective, could not work out a way to only sell them to people with lawns of Poa annua and tall fescue, so they stopped selling them in the USA.
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The thing seems remarkably well made…the only plastic part seemed to be the rotor or impeller or whatever you call it.
You sure? It was designed as a high altitude interceptor and operational requirements had Germany using it as a low level fighter bomber. I remember being a kid in the mid 80s and seeing some of those scream down the Rhine valley. Fucking ridiculous. I’d never really seen military planes before and these are just the stupidest.
No way was this the plane you should buy for that job but it was a tent peg being rammed into a rock.
Pretty sure that the Germans kept buying them because Lockheed bribed hard. Didn’t notice it in the wiki but it was a political scandal in Germany.
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^ Came here to say this too. I’m not saying that a lawnmower could produce the injuries that the failed incel bomber had…BUT it would not be great if that thing flips up into his hands 
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Pffft. The guy I saw doing that was swinging it one-handed like a pendulum.
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Hovering was the future back in the 1960s. We had a hovering Hoover vacuum cleaner. I remember the hovering lawnmower, and there was a hovercraft doing Channel crossings in England. It was the atmospheric railway of the 20th century.
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My mother had a (mains electric) Flymo in the 1980s. It wasn’t as dangerous as it looks, as one could remove the big metal blade (see 30:59 in the video) and instead attach two small plastic blades to the rotating disc. These swung freely, so centrifugal force (I know, I know…) spun them out to cut grass but if they hit anything harder they swung in or broke. They wouldn’t be pleasant on a bare foot, but they did no damage to ordinary shoes.
Incidentally, Flymos aren’t a retro thing - they’re still common in the UK.
https://www.flymo.com/uk/products/lawn-mowers/hover-lawn-mower/
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Yeah I took that several times in the 1970s. Absolutely horrible in heavy weather.
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Kudos to Toro for posting the manual to a 1965 product. https://www.toro.com/en/parts/partdetails?id=29246
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Yeah. I had one, and unless your lawn is flat they are horrible as a general purpose mower. I guess they have some specific uses, but I would never buy one again.
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