Flymo Chevron 34 VC Electric Wheeled Rotary Lawnmower, 1400W

Having now owned and used this for most of last summer and for the first cut of this year, I'm very pleased with it. It cuts well across the majority of the working width (very little overlap between passes) and has enough power to keep going at a steady pace through even thick, lush, damp grass (which it cuts in a single pass). It lifts the grass slightly to give a better cut, and picks up the cuttings well until the box is nearly full, packing the box pretty well.Having a 'dead-man's handle' on both sides is very useful when turning over borders, although I find them a bit too ready to cut out if I don't keep them tightly squeezed.Our garden doesn't really do stripes, but the rear roller makes a passable attempt at them and, more usefully, makes it easier (together with the narrower front wheel track) to hang the mower over a border to cut right to the edge of the grass.The handle folds down usefully for storage, and the mower has well-placed carry handles (I have to carry it through the side door of the garage and up and down steps within the garden).Niggles, such as they are: - Cutting height adjustment range is from medium to cricket-square short. As we don't have a cricket square, I only use the highest two settings and a higher one might be nice for the first and last cuts of the season. - The grass box viewing window is a gimmick - after a season of being pelted with freshly-cut grass it's no longer sufficiently transparent to be of any use. - I think I had to clean up one of the handle bolt threads during assembly. - The blade is driven entirely through friction, on the end of a small shaft with an even smaller bolt into it. It started slipping within the first few metres of cutting out of the box, but once tightened properly it's been fine ever since.Overall, for our relatively small and rough areas of grass (albeit quite a lot to cut in total) this does extremely well and is a massive improvement over the old (Flymo) hover mower that it's replaced. A slightly higher cutting height setting would be nice, but otherwise it's excellent.

I really wish I'd bought this mower about 5 years ago! I think with all the time I'd have saved through not having to empty it every ten minutes, or un-bung the blades, or adjust the height with a spanner, or fetch an extension chord to reach the corners of the garden, I could have written a 22 episode series teleplay for an amazon original series..After years of pushing around a little store own mower, this is literally like upgrading from a Ford Fiesta to a Land Rover. A lot of people complained about assembling the grass unit, it's really not that difficult, you just need a bit of patience and common sense, although I agree that the instructions perhaps aren't the greatest. There's a handy little video though actually on the site here that shows you how to do it. Make sure you look INSIDE at it, so see how the top connects to the bottom, and that will pretty much enable you to line things up and get it slotted in properly. Seriously, if you're having to "send it back" because you can't put two bits of plastic together, I think you need to question your place as a member of the most intelligent species on the planet.Following the box assembly and handle assembly, you are ready to go. Now for the most part I hate mowing, I specifically hate it because for some reason down the years, it's become exclusively a man-job. Why me? Why can't you do it, just once? Instead of just pointing at the grass and moaning about it? Surely you can push a mower on your own without the need to be all manly? But, when you've spent all your years of home ownership mowing gardens of various sizes with a crummy little mower that came in a box with various other start-up gardening equipment, this is bordering on joyful.To begin with, it's easy to adjust he blade height. Simply move the selector at the side. Perfect. No flipping it over, no spanners, no screws. And then there's the performance. It's amazing. Our grass usually gets pretty long, because most of the time I can't be bothered to go out and do it, and then when I do, it's a pain because mowing such thick tall grass bungs up the mower repeatedly and you have to stop and turn it over, and clear the blockage and the blades etc. Not so with the Flymo. This thing eats up weeks of grass without even slowing. Not on time anywhere, at any length or thickness did the mower stall, get blocked, or require any attention whatsoever. And then there's the box capacity, which is huge compared to my last one. I usually had to empty that about nine or ten times doing the back garden, but with the Flymo it is literally twice for the entire thing, dependent on how lazy I've been and whether or not the garden currently resembles the Sawyer's Texas Chainsaw Massacre back yard. Also it has a window on the top so you can actually see when its full, rather than waiting for the grass to start flying out underneath and leaving mounds all over the place. So easy to detach and reattach, you're empty and back on again in no time.And then to top it all off, the cord ties really neatly and nicely around the handles so I don't spent the first twenty minutes of any reluctant gardening session untangling power line and getting irate. It's no exaggeration to say that this mower has revolutionised my life. I no longer dread Sundays in the summer. No longer feign illnesses or suffer garden related anxieties. It's a truly awesome machine..