When you’re finished mowing your lawn for the weekend, it’s easy just to roll your lawn mower back into your garage or shed until next weekend. It’s wise to avoid this temptation, though, and spend a bit of extra time performing some routine maintenance on your mower.
One such maintenance task is scraping your mower deck. As you mow, grass — especially moist grass — can accumulate on your mower deck. Wet grass can cause rust and corrosion, shortening the life of your mower significantly. Scraping your mower deck can go a long way towards ensuring the longevity of your lawn mower.
At HY-C, we manufacture a lawn mower deck scraper called the Grass Hawk under our Good Vibrations brand. It’s designed to make lawn mower scraping easy, resulting in a clean, rust-free mower deck.
In this guide, we’ll take you through the ins and outs of the Grass Hawk. We’ll explain a few key features and even some caveats to help you decide whether you should add a Good Vibrations Grass Hawk to your lawn care toolkit.
Three Pros of the Grass Hawk Mower Deck Scraper
1. It’s Designed Specifically for Lawn Mowers
When it comes to mower deck cleaning, it’s popular practice simply to grab the nearest flat-headed object from a toolbox and start scraping away. These implements (like a screwdriver or a pocket knife) will get the job done in a pinch, but they’re usually inefficient and awkward to use on a mower deck.
The Grass Hawk, on the other hand, is designed specifically for lawn mower decks. From the curve of its handle to the shape and orientation of its scraper heads (yes, “heads” plural — more on that in a second), this scraper is engineered to handle common lawn mower decks to help you scrape off grass effectively.
2. It Features Two Scraper Heads
What’s better than one lawn mower deck scraper? Two lawn mower deck scrapers built into one. That’s exactly what the Grass Hawk has to offer.
One of the scraper heads is curved to help you get into the cracks and crevices of your mower deck. The other is a sharper metal head bent at a 90-degree angle. This head is good for tackling the relatively flatter sections of the underside of your mower, removing large swaths of grass in a single scrape.
Switching between scraper heads is as simple as turning the rotating dial on the Grass Hawk’s head to the unlocked position, spinning the head 180 degrees, and locking it again. The secure lock ensures that the scraper heads won’t slip during use.
3. It can Attach to a Threaded Pole
Cleaning a mower deck is awkward work. It involves turning your lawn mower on its side or upside-down, but they’re not really meant to be oriented in either position. Depending on your age or what kind of shape you’re in, it can also be tough to get down to your mower deck’s level to get any cleaning done.
It’s for these reasons that the Grass Hawk comes with a threaded opening in its base that’s compatible with common extension poles. Attaching the scraper to a pole can give you the extra length and leverage you need to scrape effectively.
What this pole compatibility is most useful for, though, is cleaning your mower’s discharge chute. This is the portion of your lawn mower through which cut grass is expelled (usually into the mower’s bag in the case of a push mower).
Moist, wet grass accumulates pretty quickly in the discharge chute, often creating a blockage. A Grass Hawk on a pole can clear this blockage easily and quickly, all without having to get down on the ground.
Two Cons of the Grass Hawk Mower Deck Scraper
1. It Has a Relatively High Price Tag
Most mower deck-specific scrapers will set you back about $15 to $20. The Grass Hawk is not too far outside of that range, costing a basically comparable $19 to $27 (depending on where you buy yours).
Where the Grass Hawk is much less price-competitive, though, is with another mower deck scraping solution: putty knives. A decent putty knife may cost $4 to $10 — one half to one third the cost of a Grass Hawk.
While a putty knife can scrape a mower deck decently, the Grass Hawk is a mower-specific solution. When you’re making your purchasing decision, you’ll have to lean on a balance of functionality vs. cost to guide you.
2. It May Have Trouble Reaching Cracks and Crevices
Not all mower decks are created equally. Some may be relatively flat and easy to scrape, while others may bend and curve at all angles. Depending on the shape and size of your deck, you may experience different levels of effectiveness while using a Grass Hawk.
Both the curved and the flat scraper head of the Grass Hawk measure 2 ⅛” in width. The curved head extends about 1” from the head of the scraper, while the flat head protrudes by about ⅜”. Depending on your mower, the heads may be the perfect sizes to scrape grass out of all the nooks and crannies — or they may be too large to be effective.
Should You Get a Grass Hawk Mower Deck Scraper?
Lawn care is a demanding activity, and lawn mower maintenance is yet another layer of the season-to-season mowing process. A lawn mower is like a car: the better you take care of it, the longer it will last you.
So, with that in mind, should you add a Grass Hawk to your lawn care toolbox?
That sort of depends on how often you mow, how much grass tends to accumulate on your mower, or even what kind of mower you have.
If you don’t clean your mower often, your mower deck tends not to gather much grass, or you’ve simply been satisfied with the cleaning capability of your putty knife or flathead screwdriver, you may be alright simply staying the course.
But if you take mower maintenance seriously or you utilize a larger zero turn mower, a Grass Hawk may be just what you need. Its dual-bladed functionality and pole attachment capability offer scraping versatility and, given the sizes of its scraper heads, it can help you scrape more efficiently than other scraping tools for just a few bucks more.
If you’re tired of the time it takes to scrape your mower deck with a knife or screwdriver, give a Grass Hawk a try. Its primary purpose is to make mower deck scraping easier, resulting in a cleaner, longer-lasting lawn mower.
