small mowing decks

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spro
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small mowing decks

Post by spro »

Cutting to the end of this, you want a wind tunnel design. Whatever mulch deck cannot remove the tall grass as well as the proper designed deck. You can look at the deck, know the rotation of the blades and see how the grass/weed is ejected. So if you need a serious deck for higher stuff, you ain't mulching. Many decks for sale are the mulch type.
Decks greater than two blade 42" are a drag on the engine crankshaft. It depends on the design but if an engine is driving a deck of 46" and relying upon belt tension against the engine crankshaft, total wrong. It is done better by improving the belt contact, not the tension.
spro
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by spro »

OTOH there is the other design like IH or Roper/Sears. There was tension but more a flexible coupling with the belts. So belts and everything become more expensive. Very heavy stuff and that is over. I'm thinking there will be an AWD robot crawling the grass soon. It wouldn't need to be very large and cut by different means.
spro
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by spro »

I am slow and it already happened. Rescue mini crawler to wrestle the mower out of problems. All directed by the smart phone. Already happened.
spro
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by spro »

Well maybe. Since I'm talking to myself here, I will expound about larger decks with vertical engines. At some point the designers placed all the stress and tension of the mower deck against the engine's lower bearing. Then they added an electric clutch/PTO. Frankly, this blows. I don't know what they expect from lower bearings but many an engine becomes out of line. When that happens, other things happen. I suppose the answer was the same as concluded decades before. If there is stress on one side, try to BALANCE it on the other. These old engineers died or watched this happening. They can't be made as before, we don't have the factories. Yet we cannot throw out the basic engineering. The belts heat and slip creating very high temperature. They have pressed steel pulleys and they wear and warp with the generated heat. This heat is transferred right up into the engines' crankshaft and people wonder why the engine is shot.
Goats. Well goats require a different type of maintenance. Wait.. Do you think I'm complaining? We have all this older engineering in our lap. Brilliant younger people have another future. Their minds are so full of newer devices and engineering. Somehow, someday it comes to the same thing.
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warmstrong1955
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by warmstrong1955 »

Spro.....

This is a mower deck......

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cp8NxbgjsiY




:)
Bill
Today's solutions are tomorrow's problems.
spro
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by spro »

Thanks ole friend. Not quite there, yet. :)
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tornitore45
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by tornitore45 »

Which shows there are still very good engineers, they are just not designing consumer stuff.

I spent 3/4 of my career designing industrial electronic, the last 1/4 in consumer electronic.
I made me professionally nauseous to reduce cost until the product lived just out of warranty.
I suppose some customer must have wandered: "who is the moron that designed this stuff".
Yet it was not a moron.
Mauro Gaetano
in Austin TX
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warmstrong1955
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by warmstrong1955 »

The unfortunate result of a price driven market.

Bill
Today's solutions are tomorrow's problems.
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tornitore45
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by tornitore45 »

And MBA's schooled on everything and knowing about nothing useful to run a business.
Mauro Gaetano
in Austin TX
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liveaboard
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by liveaboard »

spro wrote: there will be an AWD robot crawling the grass soon. It wouldn't need to be very large and cut by different means.
Yes, they have that here in Portugal, very popular.
Also provides wool and the meat is tasty.

Did I show you guys my mower deck?
No belts, it's 2 spindle all shaft and gear drive, 105" wide. Yesterday I cut through a few acres of grass so thick, I had to put the PTO in low gear and speed up the motor on the tractor to 1500.
Usually I just cut my lawn with it
mower deck.jpg
Tomorrow I have another field to cut though.
It does brush too; it makes short work of cane.
I hate cane, vile stuff.
spro
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by spro »

That is a fine package and took a lot of work to get there. I like it from afar, from the tips of the toes of trailing wheels to the rest, there isn't a substitute for HP when fields become what they do.
While still on the subject of "small mowing decks", engineering comes in and we see the problem. The older designs balanced the belts tensions by driving the deck opposite that belt driving the transmission. IH, David Bradley and Sears Roper did that. It was more complicated but didn't place the combined stress on the crankshaft, at one side. Grass is, lawns and fields were. They outlive us but a major flaw of belt driven garden tractors is not going shaft drive to at least the transaxle.
This is a simple yet large engineering problem> There are two axis to be driven by either horizontal or vertical engines. There were many designs which even a horizontal drove a hydraulic pump (Vickers) to a hydraulic motor to power a transaxle. This stuff gets old after 40 years.
Yet there was a time when it all worked. The engine is all wore out. Clearances out of bounds but evidence it did work. Freakin lawn and fields, the one continuum.
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liveaboard
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Re: small mowing decks

Post by liveaboard »

And hedges, bushes, trees!
I spend much of my working time cutting and clearing, piling and burning.
And maintaining all the machinery that does that work.
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