Hello I'm Austin Jarrett from Allett Mowers. Today we're going to be looking at our Classic
Petrol range. They come in self-propelled 14 inch and 17 inch. We call them our budget petrol
products because they are our lowest priced petrol machines and they just have less frills than our
other products but at the end of the day they're a cylinder mower with rollers and simple to use and
that is what these products give you. The 14 inch as a guide is for 150 metre squared lawns
and the 17 inch we say 280 metres. Of course you can use a smaller machine on a bigger lawn
and save some money and you can use a bigger machine on a smaller lawn
and it will give you lovely broad stripes which sometimes look so much more presentable.
The smaller of the two machines is 38 kilos and the 17 inch is 41.5 kilos
and that's plenty of weight to give you the classic Allett stripes that we love.
These are both a really great choice for small and medium lawns where you want petrol which will go
anywhere. Why are you going to choose a cylinder instead of a rotary mower?
Well if you're shopping you need to look at our video which is the rotary versus cylinder
mower video it goes into quite some depth but as an overview a cylinder cuts like scissors.
They give you the most amazing striping because of the front roller the rear roller and the way that
the cylinder treats the grass over the whole width being exactly the same giving you these lovely
contrasting stripes. You can achieve low cuts with a cylinder mower that you just can't achieve
with a rotary mower and what this mower gives you which we love about these Allett mowers is you can
with just that use of an allen key remove the cartridges for servicing more importantly I can
insert a scarifier cartridge in these machines so I can do the cultivations
that it's so necessary to get a great lawn but please look at a separate video about the Allett
scarifier cartridge. If we start right at the very front of the mower we have the grass boxes.
The grass boxes are polypropylene and that gives us a very light grass box to carry when it's full
of grass clippings. There's no paint on this so if we bump it into rockeries it doesn't go rusty
and the smaller machine has a 32 litre the larger machine has a 40 litre grass box.
They're also very quiet on the mower because they're not rattling
or drumming like a metal grass box might do. The capacity of these is really good.
The machine the actual grass box itself is very open and when you come to empty this
there is nothing to stop the grass clippings from falling straight into the wheelie bin.
Next is the front roller. If I remove the grass boxes you can see that clearly. What is
the purpose of the front roller? It helps with giving a better stripe and it is also
supporting the front of the machine so that we can control the height of cut.
The height of cut is controlled here and on this dial I have six pre-set height adjustments.
I can set it at the lowest height of cut which would be six millimetres when I have the cylinder
in but when I have the scarifier that will be down at zero in order to fetch the dead material out of
the bottom of the sward. The height of cut of the machine is set on the dial on the side by moving
the front roller up and down it changes the height of cut. The six pre-set height of cut adjustment
positions are the lowest at six millimetres, the next one is nine millimetres, thirteen
millimetres, eighteen, twenty-five, and the highest height to cut is thirty-two millimetres.
If I put the scarifier in instead of the cylinder I'm generally using that down at the lowest
setting and that gives me six millimetres when I'm using the cutting cylinder but it's down at zero
with the larger diameter of the scarifier unit. So this scissor cutting action is really created all
down here next with the cylinder. The cylinders that are fitted in the Classic Petrol's are five
bladed cylinders and that in conjunction with the bottom blades caused the cutting action. Both of
these machines give 66 clips per metre that means that we're getting a cut every 15 millimetres
which is absolutely beautiful for most lawns cut at 20 millimetres and above. The hardened
steel blades on the cylinder and the bottom blade give long life and nice sharp cutting.
One of the unique things about Allett is that we can remove these cartridges so quickly and
so easily and I can remove this cartridge so that I can transport it for servicing,
take it out in order to make adjustments, or I can put other cartridges in.
We recommend that you use the spring tine cartridge which we call the scarifier
but other 14 and 17 inch cartridges will fit into these machines from our range but we generally
don't recommend them unless you're really aware of what you're doing because with the pre-set
height adjustments I can't get exactly the depth of cultivation that I might want if i'm using the
verticut or the dethatcher cartridge. So what powers these petrol machines? This is the 87cc
Loncin engine. This engine we get in from China and it's proven over the years that we've used
this engine to be very good and very reliable and a reliable starter. The process for starting the
engine is to switch it on right at the very front, put the choke into position and put the revs.
You can turn the engine off by just flicking that switch. So they've really proven to be
very reliable engines maybe slightly noisier than the other models that we use on the
the more premium products but we're really very happy with this engine.
Let's then move on to the rear roller. So the rear roller
is an extremely important part of the strong striping that you expect from your
Allett cylinder mower. On the 17-inch and the 14-inch machines in this Classic Petrol range
they're both single-piece rollers. They're steel and they're painted. The drive for the rear roller
is controlled from the handlebars but that in conjunction with the front roller rear roller
gives us the really strong striping that we really want.
The other thing about having rollers on a mower like this is if we need to mow right
up to the edge and hang over the edge of the lawn the mower doesn't drop off the edge and
we can mow absolutely up to the side of the lawn. Handlebars of the machine- this is where
we control everything and the nice thing about this machine is that I can drive cylinder only,
I can drive rear roller only, or I can actually drive both so I'm mowing and driving the rear
roller and that allows me to drive the cylinder and push it into more difficult areas where I
want to have good control it allows me to drive it backwards and forwards to storage easily
and of course it makes for really easy mowing because I've got cylinder drive
and rear roller drive as well and I can really nip along quite quickly with this machine if I want.
The forward speed of the machine and the cylinder speed is determined by the throttle position and
I've got three positions that I can adjust this handlebar to give me different height settings.
I can undo this knob just here and once I've done that it will allow me to fold the handlebars up
to reduce the storage area that this takes up in the garage.
So in conclusion if you want a no-frills cylinder mower with a nice reliable petrol engine
in 14 and 17-inch then these are absolutely the mowers for you. In their simplicity
they are easy to use they give the great Allett stripes of course and the added advantage of
being able to remove the cylinder for servicing or for interchanging with the scarifier cartridge
then this really does give you the package to be able to create a great lawn. Thanks ever
so much for listening and please visit our website if you need to know more or look at
our YouTube channel where you'll see more about the other cartridges that fit into this machine.