Were it me, I would have started with a pre-2000's Craftsman mower as a base. They have a 6 speed transaxle with a differential (which solves the steering problem mentioned) and a built-in brake, and examples with broken or missing gas engines can be had used for $100 or less quite often. They have that boxy sheet metal look of old tractors too. It would also be possible to adjust the pulley ratios to slow it down or just block off the higher speeds until the kids get a bit older.
Granted, I understand that the purpose of a project like this isn't just in the end result. Depends what crafts you want to practice and what's just necessary work around them. There's still quite a bit of fun project left in converting an existing mower to electric and refinishing it to look more like a classic tractor.
But those are internal combustion engines, so each time your kid want to have fun, it annoys everyone.
I'd rather have my kid ingrained with the idea that electricity is the future even if it's an amazing achievement to be able to tame explosions to move around
Kids grow. If it were me I'd just remove the mower deck, throw an extra muffler in its place (because without the deck the engine will be the next loudest thing and I don't wanna listen to it). Maybe lock out the top speeds depending upon age/yard topology.
Stuff goes straight to permanent memory at that age so by giving them a "real" tractor there's a lot of potential to learn good lifelong lessons prompt them to ask the kind of questions that result in good teaching.
I did something similar last summer. My Craftsman LT1400 uses the standard 500cc Briggs motor and that motor has some tragic design flaws that make it grenade itself roughly once a season. I went through a couple of these motors rebuilding them (correctly) until I gave up.
I ripped the tractor down the the frame and removed most parts. Got $40 Ryobi walk behind mower motors (42V which is really 36V), some scooter controllers, and pulleys. I used two scooter Li ion batteries but I should have just gotten three large lead acid 12V batteries for more capacity. Still, I can mow for an hour or so and get almost an acre done which includes some hills per charge. It took about 8 total days to build and about $800.
The way I set it up is that I have one motor drive the wheels and two more motors on the deck directly driving the blades. The belt system the ICE motor version had was insanely inefficient. This system has like 20% of the power but mowed better and is way more reliable. For $150 I could get a solar array and controller to charge the batteries and never pay for anything but belt and blade replacements for life.
The hardest part of the build was lining up the mounting of the drive motor and wiring up all the safety systems (brake sensor, seat sensor, etc). The kicker is that this is a way better product than what I can buy commercially unless I get into the $5k+ territory and is completely user serviceable. No part here is more than $100 and they all readily available. The tractor has enough torque to push my huge picnic table around while I am riding it. I might try seeing if I can plow snow with it next winter.
I love this! I appreciate regen breaking will be hard to add without picking a new controller and so on but perhaps you could add a DPDT switch wired into the break that adds in a string of 3 old incandescent 12v break lights.
Oof, those welds are ugly. The author comments on the welding at the end of the article, but I'd venture a guess that if using a MIG setup the polarity may also be reversed and/or gas shielding may be wrong. On my machine the flux core wire vs solid core wire with shielding gas require opposite polarities...
> You may be thinking that 350 watts doesn't sound very powerful
You might be amazed at how little power you can get away with in an actual tractor. 20HP is close to the upper limit of practicality unless you are running a large commercial operation.
I’m love content like this. It reminds me of the mid-2000s era of the internet.
Is this “best” project I’ve seen? In terms of tech,quality,etc No. Neither are mine. This guy built a really fun project for his kids.
I love this. As AI slop gets increased, I hope that content like this starts to get filtered up to the world.
I also learned about a web-ring from his website. I think this is an artifact from the early Internet. I hope this gets more popular for website discovery reasons
If it's for kids, I'd round off those corners or add some kind of semi-flexible skirt around the bottom, because that outward 90° jut on the foot shelf by the front wheel looks potentially... painful.
I've used a length of old vinyl hose, split open lengthwise, to cover sharp corners/edges on some of my projects. Really saves tarps from tearing along sharp edges.
Dude reinvented Power Wheels from first principles and you're over there claiming a death trap? Questionable premise is questionable. Anyway keeping kids perfectly safe is how you raise high anxiety incompetents. Learning to assess and manage simple risks is a fundamental part of childhood development.
Garden should be a place where people can touch grass, leaves, flowers, fruits, plants, soil, rocks and maybe trees, without going out to a park. Ensure that children do not miss out on that. I'm not a big fan of anything that makes children to avoid their exposure to walking (prams etc), touch with ground or outside environment.
It's a tidy build, and I guess it's a fun kid's toy. Wood is a baffling choice of material for a (lawn) tractor chassis by someone who clearly owns a welder. Don't start lecturing me about Morgans and ash-- that's a whole different thing, and there's a reason they're basically the only serious company still shipping a wooden vehicle chassis.
I'm a farmer, I know what working vehicles are subjected to over time, and I know that when plywood gets wet, it swells, warps differentially, splits at its layer boundaries, and starts to twist. Tractors are for driving over land that is often at least damp. This is not a recipe for durability.
This is a thing for a child. The aim of such projects is to get it built before they grow out of it. I think given the duration and duty cycle of usage it will be fine.
Were it me, I would have started with a pre-2000's Craftsman mower as a base. They have a 6 speed transaxle with a differential (which solves the steering problem mentioned) and a built-in brake, and examples with broken or missing gas engines can be had used for $100 or less quite often. They have that boxy sheet metal look of old tractors too. It would also be possible to adjust the pulley ratios to slow it down or just block off the higher speeds until the kids get a bit older.
Granted, I understand that the purpose of a project like this isn't just in the end result. Depends what crafts you want to practice and what's just necessary work around them. There's still quite a bit of fun project left in converting an existing mower to electric and refinishing it to look more like a classic tractor.
But those are internal combustion engines, so each time your kid want to have fun, it annoys everyone.
I'd rather have my kid ingrained with the idea that electricity is the future even if it's an amazing achievement to be able to tame explosions to move around
Right, that's why I mentioned nabbing one without a working gas engine and converting it to electric as the focal point of the project.
Ha sorry, thanks for the explanation
You can buy those transaxels (different number of speeds) surplus fairly cheap, but you have to look.
Though the goal was a kids toy, and those mowers are too large for that use.
This is one I know of off the top of my head: https://surpluscenter.com/power-transmission/transaxles-tran...
Kids grow. If it were me I'd just remove the mower deck, throw an extra muffler in its place (because without the deck the engine will be the next loudest thing and I don't wanna listen to it). Maybe lock out the top speeds depending upon age/yard topology.
Stuff goes straight to permanent memory at that age so by giving them a "real" tractor there's a lot of potential to learn good lifelong lessons prompt them to ask the kind of questions that result in good teaching.
I did something similar last summer. My Craftsman LT1400 uses the standard 500cc Briggs motor and that motor has some tragic design flaws that make it grenade itself roughly once a season. I went through a couple of these motors rebuilding them (correctly) until I gave up.
I ripped the tractor down the the frame and removed most parts. Got $40 Ryobi walk behind mower motors (42V which is really 36V), some scooter controllers, and pulleys. I used two scooter Li ion batteries but I should have just gotten three large lead acid 12V batteries for more capacity. Still, I can mow for an hour or so and get almost an acre done which includes some hills per charge. It took about 8 total days to build and about $800.
The way I set it up is that I have one motor drive the wheels and two more motors on the deck directly driving the blades. The belt system the ICE motor version had was insanely inefficient. This system has like 20% of the power but mowed better and is way more reliable. For $150 I could get a solar array and controller to charge the batteries and never pay for anything but belt and blade replacements for life.
The hardest part of the build was lining up the mounting of the drive motor and wiring up all the safety systems (brake sensor, seat sensor, etc). The kicker is that this is a way better product than what I can buy commercially unless I get into the $5k+ territory and is completely user serviceable. No part here is more than $100 and they all readily available. The tractor has enough torque to push my huge picnic table around while I am riding it. I might try seeing if I can plow snow with it next winter.
I love this! I appreciate regen breaking will be hard to add without picking a new controller and so on but perhaps you could add a DPDT switch wired into the break that adds in a string of 3 old incandescent 12v break lights.
Oof, those welds are ugly. The author comments on the welding at the end of the article, but I'd venture a guess that if using a MIG setup the polarity may also be reversed and/or gas shielding may be wrong. On my machine the flux core wire vs solid core wire with shielding gas require opposite polarities...
source: I'm a terrible amateur welder
> You may be thinking that 350 watts doesn't sound very powerful
You might be amazed at how little power you can get away with in an actual tractor. 20HP is close to the upper limit of practicality unless you are running a large commercial operation.
I’m love content like this. It reminds me of the mid-2000s era of the internet.
Is this “best” project I’ve seen? In terms of tech,quality,etc No. Neither are mine. This guy built a really fun project for his kids.
I love this. As AI slop gets increased, I hope that content like this starts to get filtered up to the world.
I also learned about a web-ring from his website. I think this is an artifact from the early Internet. I hope this gets more popular for website discovery reasons
https://webring.stavros.io/
If it's for kids, I'd round off those corners or add some kind of semi-flexible skirt around the bottom, because that outward 90° jut on the foot shelf by the front wheel looks potentially... painful.
I've used a length of old vinyl hose, split open lengthwise, to cover sharp corners/edges on some of my projects. Really saves tarps from tearing along sharp edges.
Completely unrelated but https://protohackers.com/ is another one of James’s projects that I love. :)
He also built a homemade computer from scratch. James is a brilliant guy.
Projects like these make me want to buy a laser welder. They are awesome and perfect for hobbyists who want to level up.
Sorry to be boring and safety focused but no child should come with 20 feet of that it’s a death trap.
Literally children die from riding on such things.
Keep your children safe a well and alive, dont let them on anything like this or near one being driven by someone else.
Dude reinvented Power Wheels from first principles and you're over there claiming a death trap? Questionable premise is questionable. Anyway keeping kids perfectly safe is how you raise high anxiety incompetents. Learning to assess and manage simple risks is a fundamental part of childhood development.
Garden should be a place where people can touch grass, leaves, flowers, fruits, plants, soil, rocks and maybe trees, without going out to a park. Ensure that children do not miss out on that. I'm not a big fan of anything that makes children to avoid their exposure to walking (prams etc), touch with ground or outside environment.
truly awful craftsmanship, I love it!
Video please.
It's a tidy build, and I guess it's a fun kid's toy. Wood is a baffling choice of material for a (lawn) tractor chassis by someone who clearly owns a welder. Don't start lecturing me about Morgans and ash-- that's a whole different thing, and there's a reason they're basically the only serious company still shipping a wooden vehicle chassis.
I'm a farmer, I know what working vehicles are subjected to over time, and I know that when plywood gets wet, it swells, warps differentially, splits at its layer boundaries, and starts to twist. Tractors are for driving over land that is often at least damp. This is not a recipe for durability.
This is a thing for a child. The aim of such projects is to get it built before they grow out of it. I think given the duration and duty cycle of usage it will be fine.
The discourse on here would be much better if commenters at least glanced at the article.