Cordless Electric Lawn Mowers Do Work!

[breckrider]

What kind of battery? Deep cycle 12 volt?

[MN Driver]

Originally Posted by breckrider

I've got a black and decker corded electric mower. How hard would it be to make it battery powered?

I have a corded Black and Decker electric and I just hacked up an extension cord to 54 NiMh cells (9 of the 6 cell sticks from a Honda hybrid that I had no other use for) and plugged it in. These B&D corded mowers use a universal motor so you can run them straight DC, just find a good way to switch the DC power because you'll destroy the contacts or weld them shut. Mine isn't full performance, if I did it again I'd do it with about 80 volts of LiPo cells with an appropriate capacity from HobbyKing to get better performance. The guys on ES have already done exactly this. It's a bit expensive to buy the batteries to do this, usually people do this if they have the cells around like I did.