Allen scythe

 About a million years ago when I was a small boy in Yorkshire old Joss Littlewood, who lived in apparent poverty in the next farm but who had ten thousand pounds stashed under his mattress, a fact undiscovered until his death, taught me how to make a dry stone wall and how to use a scythe. I built a dry stone walled den in my father's wood and when I last visited our old house, thirty years later, gratifyingly found it still standing. New Zealand is made out of earthquakes so dry stone walling is a redundant skill, but swinging a scythe is an agreeable way to dispense with the otherwise ubiquitous line trimmer. Actually that's a fib - it's a disagreeable way. Hard work, scything. The trick is to cut long grass in the early morning. Then dew adds mass to the upper reaches, and the blade cuts, rather than knocks over. Old Joss Littlewood carried a whetstone and sharpened the blade every half-dozen strokes, but confided that this was only to allow him to get his breath back. I am not now as old as he was then, but one day it occurred to me that the hedge trimmer, unused since we left England, would be easier than swinging a scythe. Cutting the long grass in the top paddock proved easy but holding the hedge trimmer at ground level didn't, and I did have a bicycle trailer with a platform long enough to carry two dustbins of horse manure, one of those vehicles built more out of curiosity than for a purpose. (Can you tow a trailer full of horse manure? Yes, slowly, since the momentum tends to swing the bike with every pedal-stroke.)

Off with the wooden platform; long strips of rubber inner-tube; couple of short branches of the kanuka tree that the linesmen trimmed to stop it growing into the overhead power cables; bind everything firmly together with the hedge trimmer lashed in place; behold! an electric Allen scythe.

Having tested it to see that it worked - it did - all that was necessary was to cut up a mount from a TV satellite dish and weld it together as a replacement for the kanuka twigs.

The lashings of rubber serve to hold the safety switch permanently on so a switch had to be interposed in the cable, and this ain't brilliant when the blades encounter a steel fencepost. It cuts off-centre of the wheels of course but that turns out to be an advantage in that you can twizzle it round for awkward corners.  A wary eye has to be kept on the cable for obvious reasons, but the contrivance is easier on the arms and shoulders and eyes than a line trimmer, and it doesn't leave tiny bits of nylon cord everywhere.