Lawn Mower Reel Lamp

Hey. This page is more than 8 years old! The content here is probably outdated, so bear that in mind. If this post is part of a series, there may be a more recent post that supersedes this one.

[stextbox id=”info” shadow=”false”]Its called a reel mower – those old push mowers you remember the groundsman pushing up and down the cricket pitch with a smoke hanging out of his mouth.[/stextbox]

Reel (Lawnmower) Lamp

I found a rusty old reel – that’s the helical blade bit – a while ago and pondered what to do with it. I gave up and gave in and made the go-to lamp (stand and the rest of the lamp).

Reel mowers, as anything, are intriguing. Quoting wikipedia:

Of all the mowers, a properly adjusted cylinder mower makes the cleanest cut of the grass, and this allows the grass to heal more quickly. The cut of a well-adjusted cylinder mower is straight and definite, as if cut with a pair of scissors. This clean cut promotes healthier, thicker and more resilient lawn growth that is more resistant to disease, weeds and parasites.

This has obviously been written by someone with a passion for these old mowers – and they are out there. Possibly not the school linesman I remember – suspect he is long gone.

Actaully, reading people’s passions for reel lawn mowers reminds me of the following from Douglas Adams Mostly Harmless, about making sandwiches:

From Douglas Adams Mostly Harmless. It goes on.

Why did I pick up the reel off the side of the road? It a wonderful shape. Wonderful in a I-cannot-quite-work-out-how-the-formed-the-blade-geometry sort of way. DNA is a double helix – this is a quintuple helix. This blade rotates the other way to DNA though. Wrongway DNA is a bug-bear of mine.

Allan Wilson. DNA: wrong way. Insult to Allan Wilson. To be honest, I would not give you funding based on this (and your lack of response when I nicely and succinctly pointed it out).

Anyhow, I think quintuple helix lawn mower helixes (helices?) can go whichever way they want, right?

And now its a lamp anyway, not that it needed to conform to any sort of biological axiom as a lawn mower.

The stand-to-bulb connection is the chuck of an old black and decker power drill. The drill was my great uncle’s drill (which broke).

The bulb is a modern take on the Edison bulb that you see in pretty much every bar and coffee shop at the moment. This one is an LED one that runs on a tenth (or so) the power that a proper ‘modern’ Edison bulb.

Real non-LED lamp we bought in Mt Maunganui. Made from electricity pylon ceramic thing.