Tractor attachments and implements

I added this thread here as an extension of the small tractors thread.  I thought I would start this thread with a review of an implement that is somewhat hard to find in the United States, but is common elsewhere in the world—the flail mower!

Externally, the flail mower looks somewhat like a tiller mounted on the rear of the tractor.  It works by rapidly spinning a series of cutting knives along a central rod that is oriented parallel to the ground and spins those knives so that they contact grass & plants while the blades spin under the rod and forwards in the tractor’s direction of travel.  They have a sort of sweeping motion as they cut and they can really clean the land, almost down to the surface of the soil.

Flail mowers are true multipurpose mowers.  Finish mowers leave a nice final cut.  Rough cutters can mow through almost anything, but leave a pretty rough finish when they are done.  Flail mowers will mow almost anything but they leave a finish as good if not better than a finish mower.  One summer I did all of my mowing (rough and finish) with my flail mower and it never let me down.

As they mow, they really cut up the material into fine pieces, basically shredding the foliage.  Some people use this function to mechanically break down a cover crop to speed decomposition.  I found the flail mower to excell at trimming along living fences and woody hedges where I would want to cut plant material back but leave virtually no remaining chaff, the debris being so shredded it virtually disappeared.

When I sold my old tractor, I sold the flail mower with it and now I need a new one to fit my new tractor.  I have my eyes on one with an offset function so I can mow alongside my living fence without getting my face in the branches.  They are also trail mowers par excellance and can really clean up a ditch so that there is no remaining stringy material to clog up culvert.

In my opinion, the flail mower is the ultimate mower and I highly recommend them to any Permie who thinks they might need a rough mower and a finish mower but only wants to own one.  I would love to know others thoughts on this well.

Eric

I do not have a flail mower, but I am actively seeking one, but with a slightly different twist.

For me simply mowing for the sake of mowing, has no real purpose; I spend too much money on property taxes to have grass grow and not utilize it. So to that end it must get in the belly of a sheep. That means moving the cut grass once it has been cut. So for me it is in getting a flail chopper to do that.

A flail chopper is a lot like a flail mower except the grass is sent into a blower and launched into a truck or trailer to be directly fed out, or put into a pile to be compacted and ensiled.

Direct cut, the moisture content would be much too high and so bachalism could take place if a mouse was hit with the flail mower or something. Instead my plan is to mow the field, let the grass wilt, then rake up the grass, then roll over it with heh flail chopper picking it up and tossing it into a truck or trailer so that it can be compacted and ensiled. The cost for equipment would be so much cheaper then all the equipment needed for hay, and it makes excellent feed.

Travis,

You are probably right that a flail mower is not the best mower for making hay.  A flail mower really chops up grass & debris into fine residue that decomposes quickly.  Orchards are often mown with flails as they can offset easily to mow right up to the trees.  They also tend to not throw debris like a regular mower.  They also excell at reducing a cover crop.  

I personally loved the flail mower for mowing trails around my property and for mowing twiggy, woody debris.  Some of my trails are along my roughly 1k foot living fence.  With a flail mower I can offset to mow down debris without getting a face full of branches and thorns from the living fence.  In the woods. A flail mower is quite maneuverable as it does not hang out like a rough cutter, and I can maneuver into areas I could never get to with even my 4’ rotary cutter.

Personally, I have no need for hay and I don’t think hay is the flail mower’s strength.  But for my purposes, I find it perfect.

Eric

Eric Hanson wrote:Travis,

You are probably right that a flail mower is not the best mower for making hay.  A flail mower really chops up grass & debris into fine residue that decomposes quickly.  Orchards are often mown with flails as they can offset easily to mow right up to the trees.  They also tend to not throw debris like a regular mower.  They also excell at reducing a cover crop.  

I personally loved the flail mower for mowing trails around my property and for mowing twiggy, woody debris.  Some of my trails are along my roughly 1k foot living fence.  With a flail mower I can offset to mow down debris without getting a face full of branches and thorns from the living fence.  In the woods. A flail mower is quite maneuverable as it does not hang out like a rough cutter, and I can maneuver into areas I could never get to with even my 4’ rotary cutter.

Personally, I have no need for hay and I don’t think hay is the flail mower’s strength.  But for my purposes, I find it perfect.

Eric

Flails are great attachments. I have heard of people unhooking the blower on a flail chopper and just using it to mow pastures, or knocking down corn stalks.

You are right however, they have their place. Just because grass does not end up in the belly of a sheep does not mean mown grass does not have a benefit. Chop and drop, and mown pastures help grass grow better and in the end does feed sheep, even if not directly.

If I could have one and only one mower for my acreage, it would be a flail mower.  As it stands, I am planning on getting a flail mower for mowing trails, along side hedges, and work in the woods.  Since a flail mower only sticks out 2 feet from the rear of the tractor (as opposed to a rough cutter that sticks 6-10 feet out!), it is quite maneuverable.

Eric

I was at a Farm Show a few years ago and a representative was showing some FAE equipment, which are basically flail mowers for forestry applications. I got looking at them pretty close, and could not see any reason why they could not be homemade. All it consisted of was a rotating shaft with welded on carbide inserts that beat against a fixed head. That was it. The rest was just a shroud to cover the debris from flying back, The hardest part was getting something with high HP to drive the rotating shaft with teeth. Most forestry mulchers (flail mowers for woody debris)  used hydraulics, but some were direct drive.

I thought about building something like this, but scaled down, pulled by my farm tractor, bulldozer or skidder. I do land clearing on my own farm as well as for other people. Right now I have 70 acres to clear on my land alone.

Travis,

That’s an impressive machine there.  Personally, I think the hardest part about building a home made flail mower would be getting the flails balanced.  Mine spun very fast, but were as smooth as could be.

I also think we are talking about different ends of the spectrum.  You are clearing land for others for a living.  My last flail mower was 4’ wide, my next 5’ wide.

Eric

Eric Hanson wrote:Travis,

That’s an impressive machine there.  Personally, I think the hardest part about building a home made flail mower would be getting the flails balanced.  Mine spun very fast, but were as smooth as could be.

I also think we are talking about different ends of the spectrum.  You are clearing land for others for a living.  My last flail mower was 4’ wide, my next 5’ wide.

Eric

Yeah balancing things sucks, but can be done old school.

The area I clearcut is really fertile, but has thin soil, so I would really like to mulch as much junk as I can and not push and uproot which of course would cause me to lose much of it. The longer the stumps rot down, the easier it would be to grind them up of course.

I liked that design because it was pull-behind, and so the flail was powered by its own power pack. I have a 6 cylinder White Diesel engine kicking around, but how in the heck do you get all that HP to a spinning drum?

Another idea I had, though not really flail-oriented, was building a crimp roller and towing that behind my skidder so it would crush and break the logging debris left behind. Doing so right now would be perfect where the ground is frozen, yet no snow. As the roller rolled over the saplings and logging slash, it would break the dry, brittle limbs. Doing so year after year would reduce the slash and saplings down into mulch. Churning over stumps that rotted away would slowly gnaw them up to nothingness as well. It would be a low cost way of clearing land, but not really conducive to contracted out work. landowners want their land converted from forest into fields now. They just do not want to pay the $3000 an acre to do it.

Here is the area I need to clear at some point. This is only 30 acres. I have another 30 acre area, as well as a 10 acre area I clear cut a year ago.

Eric Hanson wrote:Travis,I also think we are talking about different ends of the spectrum.  You are clearing land for others for a living.  My last flail mower was 4’ wide, my next 5’ wide.Eric

Around here where papermills closed and taxes shot up overnight to dumble what they were, it left landowners with lots of forested land that had little value. People want to clear land back into valuable farmland, but unless they do it themselves, they must pay the only landclearing contractor around to do it, at $3000 an acre. That is too much; my 70 acres of land would cost a staggering $210,000!! I could never recoup my money!

So in the interest of helping others, I clear land, but I could do it faster if I had the right equipment. My business idea is to build my own equipment that gets the job done, yet it is just me doing it (no employees) to keep costs down. I like the idea of rolling across the land with a stump mulcher, then raking up the debris with a stick rake, and pushing the windows up and leaving in a few days time, for very little money on a per acre basis. My neighbors get their land cleared at a decent rate, and we can all get back to making some income with our land again.

Probably not the best for clearing stumpy land, but I wonder if a re-purposed beet defoliator would work as a flail brush mower.  The rubber flails (used to protect the tops of the beets while removing the leaves and stems) could be replaced by normal metal flails.  Can't believe someone hasn't tried!.....

John Weiland wrote:Probably not the best for clearing stumpy land, but I wonder if a re-purposed beet defoliator would work as a flail brush mower.  The rubber flails (used to protect the tops of the beets while removing the leaves and stems) could be replaced by normal metal flails.  Can't believe someone hasn't tried!.....

I like the way you think! :-)

Rebumping this thread for the tractor gear-heads out there.  Just watched a YouTube video that caused my jaw to drop:  Conversion of 540 rpm PTO  speed to 1000  rpm simply by removing a retaining ring and swapping the PTO shaft....???...... can it really be that simple.   The guy was working on an older John Deere and needed to swap the shaft which runs his baler at 540 rpm so he could run the batwing mower at 1000 rpm.  My question being, does anyone here routinely do this with their attachments and do the newer compact tractors have this option as well?  I have a 2005 JD4010 and a newer Kubota L3200..... would love to be able to step up to 1000 rpm for the rare occasions of running a generator at lower engine rpms.  Thanks!

John,

I had no idea it was that simple!  But I would *think* that bumping the RPM’s would really cut the torque, making that mower harder to power, but who knows, maybe I am wrong.

Fascinating find!

Eric

It is that easy, on SOME tractors. Some are even easier than that. But that isn’t usually an option on small utility tractors, only ag tractors 50+ ish hp

A dual speed PTP would be so nice, but they are expensive! I haven't heard of switching the shaft out, but I would presume the tractor must specifically be built for it. It would require different gearing, so if the shaft didn't have a gear on it, I would presume the tractor had two different sized sockets turning one inside the other, each fitting one optional shaft. Maybe one went through a gear reduction and the other plugged directly into the input shaft with no reduction.

Thanks for the responses.  I was in to the local Deere dealer from whom I had originally purchased my 2005 4010 and confirmed that it would not have this option.....and that only larger tractors in the US tend to have multi-speed PTOs.  This may have me changing my mind on selling off an older gray market Yanmar that is small, but has a 3 speed PTO that works wonderfully for matching PTO speed with the task at hand.  Too bad this idea is not implemented more commonly in the States.

Part of the problem in the US is liability lawyers and lawsuits. Most implements will do very bad things if you spin them twice as fast as they were designed to go, that is part of why the 540 and 1000 rpm shafts are so different. Resourceful farmers figured out ways around it, but they had to show enough intention to do it that they couldn’t sue John Deere when it went pear shaped.

This has been a great thread so far, at this point we have only really discussed flail mowers and similar devices (probably my fault, I started the conversation).

Since the thread is about all tractor attachments, I want to steer the conversation to a different attachment that I a looking to add.  In this case, it is extra hydraulics.  In particular I would like to add at least two rear hydraulic circuits, the first going towards a hydraulic toplink.

Whenever I change implements, I need to adjust the length of the toplink, something that is usually awkward to do and requires a huge wrench to get done.  I would much prefer if I could simply adjust a lever to move the hydraulic ram in and out to adjust for overall length.  This would make changing implements much faster.  

Further, when I transport an implement—say a 6’ rotary cutter—I really want to carry it as high as possible to keep it out of the ground when I go over a ditch or other terrain.  But when I mow, it needs to be made level to the ground.  I simply cannot do this quickly or easily by turning the large screw to draw in a manual toplink.

The good news is that my tractor actually had a spot to add in a set of hydraulic circuits.  The downside is that it is about $1k.  So this is something that I intend to do—sometime.  This might be practical on a medical standpoint alone as adjusting the toplink is an awkward position to exert force on my already injured back.  I would probably save money in medical bills!

And since most of this thread has been about flail mowers, I would add at least a second circuit so that I could add a flail mower that has a hydraulic offset so that I can mow alongside trails and get under branches without getting the branches right in my face!  This would be great for a rear hydraulic grader blade but I have seen there prices so my current grader blade will do just fine!

Thoughts?

Eric

Yeah. A thread on tractor attachments apparently turned into Travis lecturing on mowing grass. Totally irrelevant on my 20 acres of woodland. Tractor implement that seems like it would really matter in my world? aAgood grapple. But there's another element to be considered here, aside from the very high level question of where tractors actually fit into Permaculture - what size tractors are we talking about? Many if not most permies are talking about fairly small properties. We're on twenty acres here, and for the permaculture community in our region, we're a larger scale site. I've recently acquired a tractor from a fellow local permie who was relocating and changing his circumstance. So now I have a 20 year old 30 HP diesel Kubota tractor.
It came with a rear blade - great for driveway maintenance and snow clearing and those aren't trivial tasks, a front end loader with bucket, and a rear rotary mower. I've bought a skid steer quick release adapter for it, because it had the pin mount system. I've also bought and installed a Pat's Easy Change three point hitch system. I have a piranha tooth bar on order to add to the bucket and a set of bolt on pallet forks to go on the bucket. Tractor Supply Co. has a carry all to go on the three point hitch that I'm planning on picking up. The carryall gives a certain pallet fork capacity to the three point hitch, plus it can be pretty readily modified to carry a load of tools for when I need to go out to the distant corners of the site and do some serious work. It's a minor rear ballast in itself, but you can pick up an IBC tote with it and easily max out the carryall's 1,000 pound limit. Rear ballast can be invaluable.

What attachments are best for your tractor? It depends. What's your site like? What are your goals? What are you going to use a tractor for?
I need to clear some trails and maintain them. I need to dig a shallow pond and build and fill a bunch of raised beds around said pond. I need to move logs to service my saw mill and to manage the slash from tree tops and coppice work. So I've got need for a rough mower, a bucket on a front end loader, and a good grapple (although some people make an argument that pallet forks will do most of what you might ask a grapple to do). I might have some use for a log winch, but I think having a log arch for an ATV already, I might be able to work around that piece.