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Collection, Preservation and Display of Old Lawn Mowers

MP049: Ransomes "Reversible"

Ransomes Reversible

At first glance the Ransomes Reversible hand mower looks like many other machines from the Victorian era. But there is a hidden design feature that make this a most unusual mower. With a little modification the mower could be used upside down!

One of the major problems with a cylinder mower is that the front or leading edge of the blade becomes blunted as it passes over the fixed bottom blade. The cutting action is lessened and the mower must be resharpened. 

This presented a major problem for mower users in the Victorian era because very few people had the specialist tools needed to sharpen a cutting cylinder. This often meant that a long journey was required to visit the nearest suitable workshop or sending the cylinder back to the manufacturer for a sharpen or a replacement. Neither made much sense.

Engineers realised that reversing the cutting cylinder would, in effect, turn the trailing edge of the blade into the leading edge and double the period between visits to the sharpener's workshop. 

A number of lawn mower manufacturers came up with ingenious solutions to the problem. The simplest and, presumably, the most successful idea was to simply reverse the cutting cylinder in the mower frame. All that was required was to add a sprocket at each end of the cylinder's centre shaft so that it could be chain or gear driven whichever way the cylinder was mounted. The most common example of this idea can be found on Green's Silens Messor, probably the most successful hand mower of the Victorian era.

Close up of Ransomes Reversible showing the bolt holes on the top of the mower that were required when the bottom blade was mounted on the top of the mower.

Faced with finding a solution to the problem that did not break patents, Ransomes came up with the obvious but much trickier alternative - to reverse the bottom blade and use the mower upside down! To achieve this the bottom blade was unbolted from the frame and mounted on the top using different bolt holes. In this way the blade addressed the opposite edge of the blades on the cylinder. The long T-shaped handle was also removed and refitted to the opposite side of the mower, which was then turned upside down and used as before. The front jockey wheels kept the frame clear of the lawn which ever way round the mower was used.

One of the reasons that reversible mowers were possible was that, in most early machines, the blades on the cutting cylinder were mounted in line with the radius of the unit and were straight. This means that the angle created between the blade on the cylinder and the bottom blade is the same whichever way round the cylinder is mounted. On later machines, the cylinder blades were curved slightly to confer a certain amount of springiness and mounted with a small forward lean to help provide a sharper edge. The drawback of this is that cylinders no longer have any reversibility.

The Reversible was manufactured from the late 1870s to the mid 1880s. Its complicated design and operation may mean that very few were ever sold - we don't know - but only one or two examples are known to exist. But then, mowers of this age are always rare.