A liter of fuel contains about 7900 Calories (33,000 kJ) – that would keep Mr. Scyther going for a couple of days.
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One thing that ought be pointed out is that the scythe is not just cutting huge swaths, it is also creating a windrow whereas the weedwhacker is just tearin shit up.
If you were looking to use them to their purposes, the scythe is for the (hobby) farmer the weedwhacker is for the gardening/landscaping crews.
If you wanted to use that grass for something the scythe definitely kills it over the whacker.
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Impressive, but I’ll take the slower method over bursitis and lower back pain thank you very much.
And it’s less smelly & noisy.
One of my friends traveled through Russia a few years back, and saw someone cutting grass with a scythe, and asked him if she could try it. She had a grand time, and the person she took it from was just surprised that anyone would be so excited about it.
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This hits it on the head. No farmer replaced scythes with weedwhackers. They replaced their scythes with mowing machines. It would be interesting to see the guy with the scythe go up against a disk mower. Or even a horse-drawn sickle mower.
Still a fun video, though.
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Granted, the championship scythe guy is fit, but look at the length of the blade vs the radius of the weed whacker. Yes. Just look at it.
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In times and places when they were the only thing available, they would modify them a bit into something more useful as a weapon, called a War Scythe.
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Interesting.
A standard scythe would have been a great weapon for defeating Achilles…
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I actively hate lawn mowers. I also kind of hate lawns, but since we’re renting, I can’t kill the whole thing off as I would like to do. Unfortunately we have neighbors with nothing else to do in their lives but mow their lawns and wait for death, so they’re often out there on the damned things literally ever three days. (No exaggeration here.) I’m now somewhat tempted to get a scythe, if only as a poke to them.
OK, so the quiet part also really appeals to me. That’s even quieter than my electric mower.
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For cutting grass that’s OK, but in terms of harvesting crops it’s still pretty rudimentary and was on it’s way out from 1860 to 1900.
I see a citation about a contest in California in 1853 where someone scythed 5 acres of grass in 8 hours at a rate of 50 pounds a minute.
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Granted, no one harvests crops with a weedwhaker.
“Who Wields Me — Wields the World!”
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Superb!
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It’s the Super-Mario cosplayer that sets it all off for me.
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Now, if I wanted to be a true a-hole I would mention how a weedwacker is a much more ‘progressive’ device. BUT I’m in a good mood tonite… so I will forgo all that.
Being inspired as to a new way to cut grass this summer, all I can say for sure is that my neighbors are about to shut the fuck up.
I think the key is to not let your lawn get that high in the first place.
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Another task of that era was cutting chaff as fodder for animals by putting plant stems in a small trough and hacking of the end with a cleaver. This was another task done by itinerant laborers in the weeks following the harvest.
I was going to work up the math on the tensile strength requirements of cutter line at different lengths at a constant RPM, but then I kinda gave up because I’m rusty on my equations of motion, and kept screwing up unit conversions.
Suffice it to say, doubling the length of the line and subsequently doubling the line’s mass requires more than double the tensile strength of the line, because centripetal force scales with the square of the velocity of the tip of the line.
So for just plain old weedwhacker line, if you’re going to double the radius of the circle it traces, you’re going to have to slow down the “blade” speed considerably or risk line shrapnel everywhere.
Also, the amount of force the line can apply to weeds scales with the square root of the velocity at the tip, because leverage. So just doubling the line’s length but running it at the same RPMs is going to make for a less effective cutting blade as well.
This of course is not taking inertia into account. Just working on tension equations.
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Thats how you get the kids interested in garden work.
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