Alright y'all, I'm hoping to upgrade my mowing gear. I've been running a 5' rotary cutter, and I want to go bigger. However, I'm not sure how much bigger I can go.
Is there a type of mower, like a sickle bar or flail mower, that uses less power than a rotary cutter? My tractor ('67 IH 424), is about 36 PTO horsepower. I usually mow in 3rd gear low range, and the tractor runs the 5' well. I'm mowing around 20 acres, and would like to spend less time doing it. Could I run a 7 or 8 foot flail or sickle mower?
A flail of that size is available from several manufacturers BUT-
You may be money ahead looking for a surplus mowing tractor on many of the web auction sites or at state of local municipality auction as they have diesel engines and batwing flail mowers and boom mowers attached.
A disc mower may be more than what you want also and will cost more
-but saying that
another option is a used towed flail chopper for grass silage for that width as you are not towing a wagon.
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A 75 inch caroni flail mower is the FRTM1900FSC is the finish cut flail mower
with 112 grass knives.
The issue is your budget and how fine a cut you want to have as the grass knives will reduce everything to the ground with no issues as long as you go slowly or make high and low passes-but it also depends on how often you mow and that must be taken into consideration.
The grass knives last a long time and are easy to change or replace for sharpening.
The more often you mow the less brush you have, mowing in a spiral pattern saves on braking and turning and backing up to mow.
the issues are
your time
your budget
the speed of mowing desired versus width of cut
where mowing in spiral saves so much time when
mowing brush its hard to believe and you can overlap
a bit too.
the desired finish if thats an issue
animals on grass while mowing if any
mowing slowly with a flail mower will shred everything and leave little residue to look at as it is sliced to tiny bits and will leave little regrowth to deal with at every mowing.
A five or six foot flail mower for general use may be all you need and thier are lots of good used ones with good used iron all over the place for sale.
Another option is the Acre Ease towed rotary mower they can be ganged with 2 and 3 or more mowers for wide width and your IH simply becomes a tow vehicle with less strain on the powertrain.
My dad had a Ford Jubilee with a 7 foot john deere grass mower which he used to mow the 8 acres of unused pasture we have so its easily done with a flail of any size.
It may simply be an issue of lowering your guage wheel to allow the deck to drag on the ground the wheel acting as a caster.
If the rear is high you should tighten the top link and level the mower deck with the ground to mow in float if you have not done that already.
