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Build Your Own Flying Lawn Mower
Ant writes "Ever seen a flying lawn mower (streaming; download 5.1 MB WMV file) before? I haven't. The WMV video file description says: 'FlyingThingZ Sky Cutter .40 V2 flying at Moon Lake's Annual Make a Wish Foundation Airshow for 2004'. More information can be found on the official Web site. Seen on Blue's News. My good friend, KaT, brought up a good question: 'Since lawns (also known as grass) live usually less than 6" from the ground, how would flying help them do their job better?'"
in case of slashdotting on that site and to reduce slashdotting on my site (I get 25 GB per month... i'll use about 20 this month)... tack on the filename in the 5.1 MB file link to "http://www.calcgames.org/site/pub/" and it'll be there. Please, if you have bandwidth, mirror it to your site, and PLEASE do NOT post a linky to my site.
... to not just mow the grass, but to give my neighbor a haircut!
What's that in the sky?
Is it a bird?
Is it a plane?
It looks....it looks like a lawn mower!
FUCK!!! IT'S COMING RIGHT FOR US!!! DUCK!!!
*Mower "Mows" through field of humans*
It's just a model airplane, not a real lawnmower.
My niece was killed by a flying lawnmower when she was 4. The thing leapt off the ground after hitting a stump and the rotation of the blades created enough lift to set it into flight. You'd have expected the automatic cutoff to kill the motor, but my brother in law held on to the thing and it just took off. She was playing on the second floor balcony when my BIL and the mower caught her upside the temple. Took her scalp clean off.
She's better now, but those first few hours were pretty harrowing.
Made the part of my brain that knows things about fluid mechanics shut down and the other part go get a drink. I'm beyond baffled as to why the thing not only flies, but apparently handles pretty well.
Only in a Slashdot fantasy can a Slackware install turn into several hours of sex . . . . .
Just a small model of a lawn mower made out of balsa and foam with an engine tacked on.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
I've discovered that I really have a liking for 'Industrial Squaredance' music...
/me makes an appointment with his psychiatrist.
amazingly the server is holding up quite well... i'm getting a good 10 mbps every time i download it (and i've downloaded it like 10 times just to be sure).
I always felt sorry for the people who yelled "is it a bird?" and "is it a plane?" during the intro. Do these people get excited every single time they see a bird or plane?
This thing (or a variant) has been around at LEAST 6 years (probably a lot longer, but that long at least I remember seeing a picture of it).
The way it works is that the "deck" of the lawnmower itself is the wing. It is essentially a strange-shaped flying wing. The "bars" to the handle are the rudders, and there's elevons (combination aileron/elevator) behind the deck/wing. You can easily see the engine and propellor on the front as-is.
Neat to see more pictures of it though, even if variants of it have been around for a while.
Erioll