Flymo

Flymo Garden Lawnmowers

Flymo is a brand name, believe it or not. They make lawnmowers, which is something that everybody knows. Fewer people know that they do in fact make many different types of mower, they make petrol mowers, as well as electric mowers, and they do actually make mowers with wheels on, which stay on the ground!

To many of us, Flymo is no longer so much a brand name, as a breed, of lawnmower. We are all guilty of it, calling a mower which has been made by a company completely unrelated to Flymo, a Flymo.

Flymo were the first company to build hover mowers, and in the same way that we call all vacuum cleaners ‘hoovers’, regardless of who made it. So we call all hover mowers ‘flymos’, regardless of who made it.

The first hover mowers were made in 1969 by a manufacturer called… you guessed it…Flymo. They were called flymo because the mowers which they produced were in effect, FLYing Mowers.

Basically hover mowers are just rotary mowers without wheels, the blades are made in such a way that as they spin, they create a strong downward current of air which is forceful enough to push the entire mower off the ground and cause it to glide along on the ‘cushion’ of air which is created.

This can create problems if the lawn is bumpy and uneven, as the edges of the mower can become stuck on the ridges, a tilting of the entire machine is needed to get it over the bumps, a great deal more effort is required, making the job quite a lot more difficult.

If the lawn is perfectly flat and even though, the mower will glide like a dream, mowing the entire lawn very quickly and with very little effort.

For those that like their lawns to have perfect ‘cricket field’ stripes however, the Flymo is definitely not an option. No part of the mower touches the lawn itself and so cannot flatten it as it goes, and anyone who has ever used a hover mower will know that it is nigh on impossible to move them in a straight line, it is easier to move them from side to side, in a sort of swinging motion.

The mowers themselves, unlike their cumbersome cousins the petrol mowers, are extremely light in weight anyway, this cushioning with air beneath them gives them even more weightlessness, giving the user a feel that it is simply ‘gliding’ along the ground, with very little physical exertion needed.

Initial advertising used this to appeal to housewives, who no longer had to rely on their husbands to mow the lawn; no doubt this also made the mowers popular with the husbands themselves as well.

This was the sixties and as women were developing more and more independence. The Flymo made this even more possible, and therefore made the Flymo even more appealing.