Vintage Horticultural and Garden Machinery Club

I’ve often considered writing about Flymo, yet the more information I see the more immense the task becomes. Flymo, like many manufacturers had multiple interests and it turns out their range of machinery is huge and it would perhaps be a difficult task to find out all they made. Talking of manufacturers varied interests, today I discovered that Qualcast not only made mowers but also greenhouses too, who knew that?! 

Onwards with this post. Sometimes things turn up unexpectedly, a brochure is good or an advert or even a price list with specifications and options. Yet to find cast printing plates for magazines and newspapers as shown in the images below is, although not rare, quite interesting nevertheless. I’m sure many thousands of printing plates were discarded, melted down or recycled somewhere, but here I’ve now come across a surviving selection of Flymo printing plates and, for a later article, some Atco and Ransomes ones too. 

This group of Flymo printing plates depict several mower models, I’ve honoured these plates by photographing them out on the lawn, sadly a non-Flymo’d lawn though, actually done with a Stiga mulcher in a feeble attempt at being somewhat environmentally friendly but still burning petrol. 

Back to Flymo, I’m assuming several of these plates are from the 1970’s as the mentioned Flymo Electric 38 was available certainly in 1972 – costing around £60.00 at the time. Through the wonders of modern technology these advert images are reversed further down this article to see what they looked like when printed.