For many years I have been mowing the orchard with a slasher mounted on my tractor. This was perfectly fine while the fruit and nut trees were little more than sticks in the ground but as they got bigger I had to stay further and further away from them with the mower lest I break branches off.
Another problem was that when it rained there were some areas where the ground got very soft and the weight of the tractor would break through the surface and I'd end up with a lot of deep ruts. Not a good thing.
I tried to mow the orchard with my nice ride-on mower with the catcher that I use to mow the house garden but it just wasn't up to the task. I also didn't want to ruin it so I started looking for another solution. Just going out and buying a heavy duty mower wasn't an option.
As luck would have it, one of our friends moved to another part of the country and asked me to look after her ride on mower while she got sorted in her new place. When I collected it the mower had some defects that I fixed up after getting it home. The main thing was that the mower deck had a fair bit of rust so I cut that out and welded new steel back in.
This was a 17hp mower with a 38" side discharge deck which did very well mowing the orchard and driveway. Sadly after about a year our friend had bought some land and needed her mower back so the search was on for a similar mower.
It took a while but eventually I found a broken medium duty Husqvarna ride on that was for sale on an auction website and bought it for a modest amount of money. The transmission was thought to be broken so I had researched how to fix a hydraulic transmission and felt that was something I could do.
After picking it up and getting it home I put the drive belt on the transmission and to my delight the mower drove right off the trailer and into my barn. I did find out at that time that the biggest problem was that all the steel transmission mounts were torn and the transmission was hanging onto the mower more by luck than design.
Taking the transmission out was simplicity itself; I took the mower deck out from underneath and then just lifted the mower up and the transmission just fell out.
There were some minor issues with the transmission but my local John Deere dealer was kind enough to give me the replacement part free of charge (thanks Tony!).
The mower deck needed fixing as well because of rust and botched previous repairs so I bought some steel for that and welded it in.
I took the deck apart, stripped it, welded the new steel in, sanded it, and finally primed and painted it. After that is was time to do something about the transmission mounts. I fabricated three new mounts and welded two in while the third is bolted onto the front of the transmission.
A quick squirt of paint and it was time to put all of the bits together again. All of that took just a few hours each day over 3 weekends. Rescued the old battery with some long and slow charging and I now have a 22hp 42" side discharge ride on mower that cost me slightly more than a third of what a fully working secondhand mower would have cost.
And it works wonderfully well. The first mow was through more than knee high grass and the mower never missed a beat. From here on in it will get an easier life because I've now caught up with the mowing again and the grass won't get that long again.
No comments:
Post a Comment