well got a wild hair....
I have been playing around with the idea of playing with my mower and making it faster. it is a simple belt driven mower and it is 9 years old and was $700 brand new.
the idea is that there is a front pulley and a rear pulley. making the rear pulley smaller increases the speed (but decreases torque)
I had an 8.75 inch pulley on the rear and now it is a 5.44 inch pulley. obviously the belt had to change.
the difference was 60% so it should have gone that much faster. I used my handy dandy GPS to track my speed. the numbers below are actual speeds by the GPS. also realize that it probably isn't as accurate at lower speeds.
Gear____8.75____5.44
1_______1mph___1.8mph
2_______2mph___3.4mph
3______2.9mph__4.8mph
4______3.3mph__5.4mph
5______4.2mph__8.3mph
R______1.6mph__2.4mph
pulley and belt (I ended up going with a different belt)
this is the original pulley and the new one side by side
my goal was to have fun with it and to get it faster but to still have it usable as a mower. I used to mow in 4th gear. now 2nd gear is pretty much where 4th gear was. I can still mow with it and have a little fun. it is kind of like my redneck 4 wheeler.
just for fun (and because several people at work said I would be racing it within a year) I put a number on the side of it.
I know this has nothing to do with gas savings but I figured we could all use a good laugh. it was a fun little project and relatively inexpensive. I like to pick on the rednecks. little did I know that I was one of them too..... lol
the beef
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