Riding Lawn Mower Trimming Attachment

I was in the hospital visiting a relative when I saw an interesting sight. It seemed to be a riding vacuum cleaner driving past in the hall. The thing that really interested me was the fact that the driver had a hand held attachment. He held a hose that he was using to get the spots along the walls. This got me to thinking.

On riding lawn mowers, often you can not adequately get the trim. You often need to grab a push mower or weed-whacker to complete the edging. Not only does this take longer, it negates part of the convenience of having a riding lawn mower.

It would not be a difficult task to create a weed-whacker that could 'clip on' to a riding lawn mower. The weed-whacker could even draw power (through a cord) from the lawnmower.

When you reached a point that the lawnmower could not properly deal with, you whip out the whacker attachment. If it had a long pole/handle you could do use it from the seat of your mower. Once you were done with the edging, you would just turn the whacker off and fasten it back into place.

This wouldn't be a huge convenience, but I bet its marketable.

Safer Lawnmowers

Lawnmowers are essentially giant whirling death blades with nothing to prevent non-grass things from 'falling' into them.

A lot of electric razors have metal meshes designed to pull in hairs, but keep the blades away from the skin. Something like this could work well on a lawnmower. The holes in the mesh could be fairly large. They would need to be just small enough to make it hard to stick your finger through.

Not only would this reduce the chance of people having unfortunate accidents with lawn mowers but it could also reduce the chance of other problems. It would be a lot harder to run over a lawn hose for example. Rocks and branches wouldn't get sucked up and spit out.

To get it to work, the grill should not be horizontal, but rather at a slight angle to help catch the grass rather than just push it down.

Such a device could be sold in a kit that could be retrofitted to existing lawn mowers or come pre-attached.

With safer lawnmowers it could become more reasonable to have automated Roomba like lawnmowers without worrying about them killing us all.