Mower Blades: More Complex Than You’d Think

While designing the robot mower, I spent a lot of time working on the chassis, electronics enclosures, and wire routes. I tried hard to select components I could easily acquire at a reasonable cost, and that effort paid big dividends when I went to get everything built.

Unfortunately, I didn’t spend nearly as much effort on how the mower blades would attach to my motors, or even what the mower blades would look like. I assumed I could easily find any mower blade size I would need, or that making my own custom blades wouldn’t be difficult.

Now that the blades are the only thing missing on the robot mower, I’m realizing how mistaken that assumption is. I designed the mower deck for three 12in long blades, thinking that surely such a size exists. But most blades are generally in the neighborhood of 20in long.

Small gasoline powered mower engines operate at speeds in the range of 2,500RPM to 3,000RPM, and to achieve an appropriate blade tip speed slightly less than 19,000ft/min, the math forces you to use a blade that is between 19in to 22in long. Blade sizes outside this range aren’t common.

Initially I decided this wasn’t an issue: I’ll just make my own blade. It’s just bar stock with two sharp edges, right? Well, kind of. There’s a fair amount of metallurgical considerations that go into mower blade fabrication. On the one hand, you want a soft, ductile blade that doesn’t shatter when it hits a rock or tree stump. But on the other, you want the blade to be able to keep a sharp edge for a long time, which means making the blade, at least near the sharp edge, more brittle.

Cutting grass creates an inherently moist environment under the deck, so mower blades are usually painted or feature some kind of corrosion resistance. And on top of all this, a good blade will have a small bend opposite the cutting edge to create a little wing so that the grass clippings can be pulled upward resulting in a nice, even height cut.

The more you learn about mower blades the more you start to realize that buying one is really the way to go. In your research you’ll come across horror stories of guys who made their own mower blades and either welded them poorly or jury rigged them to work and then got hurt or even killed by the shrapnel from a blade shattering. Just this video alone should give you pause: there’s a lot of energy under a mower deck.

So off I went to find a 12in long mower blade. The closest I could find was one that was 12.125in long, which leaves 0.375in between the blade tips when they rotate past each other instead of the 0.625in I had designed for. We’re about to find out how accurately the mower deck weldment was made. I really hope I don’t have to grind the ends of the blades down because they crash into each other.

Finding a blade is only half the battle. How do you attach it to the 0.5in diameter keyed shaft on the E30-400 motor? The crankshaft on most push mowers I’ve seen has a threaded hole in the shaft for bolting the blade on. The E30-400 has nothing of the sort.

Could you drill and tap a hole in the end of the shaft? Possibly. But a #10-24 threaded hole is about the biggest you could drill and tap, and that only gives you 0.083in of edge margin from the major diameter of the threads to the keyed portion of the shaft. Too close for comfort in my mind.

The first solution that I came up with was to take a piece of 1.5in long, 2in diameter round stock, bore a 0.5in hole in it, key the hole, and then drill and tap holes for mounting the blade and some set screw holes to clamp the key up against the shaft. But in this scenario, the set screws are the only thing that holds the blade on the shaft. Better than nothing, but not by much.

I got a few quotes on three of these parts and the keyway really kills you on cost. I got several no bids because of the keyway alone. And the quotes I did get back were pretty high. Because I don’t like spending $300 on blade adapters, it was back to the drawing board.

What I really need is something with a keyway already in it. Initially I looked into some keyed pulley bushings, but they too have no way to hold themselves on the shaft. That and they have to match your hole pattern on the blade, and none of them met that criteria. They’re cheap, which is nice, but don’t really work for this purpose.

Eventually I got turned onto the idea of using solid shaft couplings. They’re keyed and include set screws. But the outer diameter for most half inch couplings is 1.5in or larger. That leaves no clearance for the bolts to mount the mower blade, which are 1.625in apart.

After some more digging, I found these smaller OD shaft couplings. And on top of their 1in outer diameter, they come with 2 pairs of set screws offset by 90°. Not bad! Take one of them and weld it to a plate with a hole pattern matching your mower blade, and you’ve got a custom mower blade adapter for ~$30 a piece after material and labor. The result looks like this:

The nice thing about the plate is that you can get a lock nut on the back side. I’m less worried about things vibrating loose compared to the machined adapter where the bolts run straight into a threaded hole.

But even with four set screws clamping up against the shaft, you really need some positive retaining feature to make sure the blade stays on the shaft. To meet this design objective, I figured it’s best to keep things simple: drill a small hole perpendicular to the coupling and the motor shaft, and then run a small hairpin through it. You don’t need a big one to keep it on the shaft.

The hairpin will add a little bit of eccentricity, as will the set screws. How much? I guess we’ll find out soon. Once the parts get back from the shop I’ll post some graphs and pictures.