Who else uses a scythe?

Darn tootin' you do! If you find a good one need tips on restoring it just let me know!

Uploading a video right now of how to move up and down a mowing area instead of the usual spiral. Handy in a lot of circumstances in my experience. It's buttercup season again!
 
Here's the latest demo--the usual method for clearing a spot is to mow in a clockwise spiral until you arrive at the middle. This works great most of the time but in some circumstances you may wish to move from one side of the space to the other in rows. Naturally you don't want to just finish a row and run all the way back to start the next, so here's a way to mow both up and back along rows.

[video=youtube;vyqVtIHhf34]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyqVtIHhf34&feature=youtu.be[/video]
 
FortyTwoBlades said:
Darn tootin' you do! If you find a good one need tips on restoring it just let me know!

Uploading a video right now of how to move up and down a mowing area instead of the usual spiral. Handy in a lot of circumstances in my experience. It's buttercup season again!
Click to expand...

Oh, rest assured, if I find one, I'm sure I'll be bugging you.
 
Please do! We need more folks rescuing them from people who want to use them as *shudder* "rustic decor". :p
 
Fence line maintainance, gettin' in there close to clear out the nettle first with this little half length makes that inclose work easy and then on in there with the little sickle thing I found down there in France so I can get at those posts with the pine tar.


E.DB.
 
Nice bow cradle you've got rigged on it!

I want to try to get Seymour to switch the positioning of the hole they put in their blades to the base so that it can be used for a grass nail. Don't know why they bother putting it in the toe of the blade.
 
I would tell them not to put a hole in their blades. I know, I know it makes it a pain to hang it up but the cons outweigh the pros.

E.DB.
 
I'm in total agreement. I think it would be easier to convince them to move it rather than remove it, though. :p
 
More importantly I'd like to influence them to change some other details about their blades such as the profile. They're obviously "American blades made by an Austrian company" and don't quite hit the mark for being true to form. However, for this sort of thing to be done they would have to be convinced of the economic advantage of doing so. Seymour makes much much more than just scythes and I doubt that they're the top selling item for them, or even in the top ten. I hope to change that for them, and in doing so take steps to raise the quality bar, but it'll take time! :)
 
Well, probably they have other considerations when it comes to their scythes, like mowing on steep mountainside pastures. Personally I like the form for mowing lighter grass but sometimes I prefer the other scythe that carries with it a bit of momentum.

E.DB.
 
Completely! The continental style of scythe is the best tool for certain sorts of mowing, and both the Anglo-American and continental patterns have their own advantages and disadvantages depending on what you're doing with them, though there's a lot of functional overlap between them. Seymour is an American company but contracts the blades through Shroeckenfux--which otherwise is exclusively a manufacturer of continental scythes so their workers don't really "get" American blades at all. Peter Vido told me that one fellow there thought that the American pattern was used for cutting sugar cane and that the rib of the blade was for the juice to run down! He seriously could think of no other reason why it would be a part of the blade design. The folks at Seymour themselves are excellent people but similarly have grown less familiar with the tool as the generations passed so they naturally couldn't recognize when the blade forms started to get a bit...off. The steel and heat treatment is fantastic--they just aren't true to form at the present time and I'd like to see that fixed. At least eventually! :) The present blades do work for their intended task but a better form would work, in turn, work better too.
 
I don't know. I just think they are different. Your blades are more similar to what they use in Sweden I have noticed.

E.DB.
 
They do, indeed, have a lot of similarities in blade design to a number of Swedish styles. In fact, a lot of American blades used to be sourced from Sweden back when they still had an active scythe industry and Fux used to produce Swedish-style blades. No longer though, so that's where the confusion comes in on their end.
 
Took this one yesterday. Relaxed mowing of tall dense buttercups interspersed with dogwood.You can tell when I'm tackling the dogwood because I use short abrupt strokes. My shoulders are a little sore today (in the good exercise-induced way) from all that dogwood, but I cleared pretty much everything you see in the screen. The camera shut itself off because I ran out of card space.

[video=youtube;TQRLoMG-qf4]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQRLoMG-qf4[/video]
 
I've never used one but I remember from 65 years ago, my grandfather used one all the time. I was not allowed near the thing by Grandma! 24 years ago we bought an old farmhouse with outbuildings and in a little garage there is a scythe with blade hanging from the rafters. I've never touched it but maybe I'll get it down and post a pic here. I know nothing about it but maybe I'll learn:)
 
Here's the .gif of the "weed stroke"

WeedScytheStroke.gif
 
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