During the ole lady's travels in her work, she sometimes comes across little gems that people leave on the side of the road for refuse due to any number of reasons. Items like furniture, luggage, even push mowers have been recovered. Some items we were able to resurrect enough to be functional then resold while other items were given to charity mediums after no sales were made. One of those such items is a battery electric push mower that she found. This push mower is one of the first generation push mowers, rated at 36v and using sealed lead acid batteries for power with a direct connection to the motor through a series of safety switches. It was a pretty simple design for the time but outdated with today's brushless 3 phase AC motors run off of DC motor controllers coupled with lithium batteries, making for machines that are more powerful and longer lasting with a certain level of efficiency where internal regulating electronics can cut power under light loads to preserve battery life. Anyway, because we already have one of those such push mowers so there's no need to try and resurrect this machine in its normal state. Plus, we already have a faux bush hog, made from one of these old school battery mowers, which depending on what I might think up next, may still end up becoming a donor for parts. As for this machine, my intent right now is to strip this machine down and harvest the usable parts while dividing those parts that can go to metal scrap and the rest, the plastic, be disposed of later. First thing that came off was the handle, which also has the multi switch assembly for activating the machine. I wanted to pull the switch box free to free the handle so it'll be completely out of the way while I further disassemble the mower body. I will further break down the switch box to get the main switch that would be used for activating the motor. Such a switch could be used for turning the motor on in an application like an electric bike where the motor may not be activated all the time, and just used for short bursts to get a bike or similar machine up to speed. Several star bit screws held the cover in place over the mower. After pulling the cover off, I had before me three large batteries and a large electric motor along with a minimum of wiring. I pulled the batteries free to get those out of the way, then separated the wiring from their respective points, having to cut one of the wires from the motor, leaving two wires on the motor that are long enough to be spliced into for any future project. The rest of the wiring was removed, which was obviously connected to the switch box. The next move was flipping the mower body over to remove the blade from the motor shaft, which surprisingly was pretty easy despite the rusty nut and threads. A little WD40 helped in making the nut come off easier. Three small bolts then came off to fully remove the motor from the mower body. This large motor should be more than able to power something like a bike or even a small go kart with the right gear ratio on the drive sprockets. With the motor out, now its just a matter of stripping all the metal parts from the body so I can make my separate piles for recycling. The wheels were pulled free and set aside as these always come in handy for adding wheels to different machines around the yard. The axles were removed along with their associated hardware, some of which are U braces that can be used for retaining multiple things. The axles more than likely will be immediately recycled if I don't come up with a use for the metal rods that make up the axles. We'd just have to see. With the removal of the axles, I was left with a uniquely shaped mower body that gave me some ideas as to what I could do with this stuff. Looking at the mower body at the right angle gave me the idea that it could serve as the body for some kind of go kart like machine, that could very well be powered by the same motor removed from it. I even thought to go as far as use bike wheels as the drive wheels and rigging up a front steering that also uses bike wheels, making what amounts to a bike car of sorts, powered off the 36v motor and using regular lead acid batteries for yard use, or even for recreational purposes for kids. Possibilities are endless. As can be seen, I have many parts left over. The metal pile may very well be put to use in lesser ways as scrap in the process of building something such as what I described earlier and if not, just scrapped completely. The plastic on the other hand will just be disposed of like any other trash as molded plastic pieces have very few uses outside of what they were designed for. This is fine, the point to this whole project was to "process" this piece of junk hardware into several usable parts that can be assembled into something that is, well, usable, versus just letting this dead mower sit in the middle of the yard. Stay tuned for whatever future project idea that I may come up with for this salvaged hardware.
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