The big reason is a lot of the states are requiring narrow transport. Today with tractors, they're not necessarily looking to put boom mowers on them so you're width restrictions are getting less and less and tractors are getting wider and wider. So it's hard to outfit a tractor with a boom mower and stay under 102 inches wide. This machine here is all folded up with this boom mower on is 102 inches wide so it meets all local state requirements for on-road mowing. It's just they wanted an all-purpose machine. This has so many functions. You can't do everything with a tractor and a boom mower that you can with this.
Putting a boom mower on a tractor has become more and more challenging. The main thing is tractors now have DEF tanks and tier four emissions so everything is getting more compact. There's less frame space underneath the tractor with tanks and stuff. There are huge modifications involved in putting boom mowers on tractors and tractors now just don't have the room to do it. On some units where the traditional tractor boom mower is on now, sometimes you've got a radiator hanging out off the back because there's just nowhere to put that stuff anymore.
On the front of the Mantis, you will find a three-point hitch. You can put a variety of attachments on it including snowplows, snowblowers, a front mower, or a power angle broom. Essentially any three-point attachment that's hydraulically driven, you can put on the front here. Also, there is a PTO option that you can put PTO implements on the front of it. There is enough hydraulic flow to run a hydraulically driven version as well as the option PTO.
We have had setups go through the shop to give townships more season versatility by taking a regular tractor and putting on a boom mower, fabricating a front three-point hitch, and it's all trying to fit more onto the tractor. And once there is a configuration that works, it only works for a couple of years until the manufacturer makes changes to the tractor. There's so much variability in those things and that makes them harder to support in the long term.
The other advantage to this is it's not just a boom mower. You can put a set of triple wide-area mowers on it. Its only function is to mow. A boom tractor, once you put a boom on it, that's its only function. You can't use that tractor for anything else throughout the year. The boom swings back and out of the way, but it can also come off completely. Alamo says it would take a day to take this implement off and switch out. So it's essentially a full shop day with somebody who knows what they're doing so this boom mower would come off. There is a pin down below. Then this whole thing lifts off. When you do switch implements, this rear hydraulic block stays with this mower. Your next attachment that goes on gets its all-new hydraulic bags. This just sits on here. It slips off and comes with. We'll see how it's just kind of hooked on there. Every implement uses different hydraulic requirements. Different hoses, different kinds of controls. That's why they kind of made this so module that it's as simple as unhooking some hoses and taking this off. Instead of unhooking every hose for every function on the boom, you can just remove the entire manifold and then install the manifold with your new attachment.
Inside the door behind the boom, is where your battery is going to be stored. You can also get into your hydraulic hoses to diagnose what's going on. If you have a leak, you can get in there and see. This unit does have three hydraulic pumps on it. One would drive your drives, one would drive your implements, and the other pump is for your front implement. It does have a separate pump for that.
Under the hood is a tier four Perkins diesel engine. It is a DEF machine, so it does require DEF fluid. This unit would be easy to service, there is lots of space and things are within reach. There are panels that can be opened on three sides of the engine. From the back panel, you can find the enormous cooling package. You have your main radiator for the machine, the hydraulic coolers, and air conditioning. Along the side, you can access the turbo and emissions filter. Both are very accessible.
The counterweight on here, they did put some thought process into this. They built fort pockets right into the counterweights so when you go to remove this weight, there are bolts right here that you would take off, bring your forklift in, and pick this whole stack counterweights off. Springtime guys would put a boom mower on once. They're done mowing in the spring, they might want to put the wide-area mowers on for summertime interstate mowing. Once the grass is done growing for the year, they will either choose to put the boom mower back on to push tree branches and stuff back, or at that point, they might put the snowblower on the front of this thing. So we're looking at spring and fall and a boom mower, interstate work in the summertime, and then potentially using a snowblower for the winter. This machine does have stability control. Behind the tire here, you'll notice a cylinder. What happens when we were going around the corner, turning downhill, that really plants the machine and keeps it from getting all unstable. Typically your boom mower tractors will have kind of a floating front axle, so once you get off canter, it will lift your back tire off the ground. It just really plants it to the ground, causing it to be more stable.
Neil: It's an impressive-looking screen.
Justin: It's a very large, easy-to-read screen. Everything, when it pops up on the screen, you'll be able to see every function that it has, where you can make your adjustments. It'll give your diagnostics for your mower. Once the white screen turns on here, we can turn it on. We'll reach down, start the engine.
Neil: So I got to start the engine. Oh, there you go. Because there's probably enough diagnostic stuff that it's waiting for.
Justin: On your control stick here, everything's labeled. It's just like an excavator. If you pull this stick back towards you, it will lift the boom up. If you bring the stick in towards you, it will bring the boom in and out. It's just like an excavator. Then on your stick, you have a couple of different toggle switches here. This one here, everything is labeled. When you bring the toggle towards you, it'll move the boom back and forth. The bottom rocker here will tilt your head. The black toggle will open and close your cutter door. Then you also have two rocker switches next to your joystick that will telescope your boom in and out.
Neil: This is a lot more intuitive than the controls that are in a lot of the tractors.
Justin: Once you get operating time in, you can really know what each one does and you don't even have to think about it.
Neil: And that rotates your head.
Justin: If you ever get into trouble, there is an attachment shut off button. It's an emergency kill. It will kill all the power to your attachment. With this particular machine, you can run a set of triple mowers so you get, I believe it's 22 feet cut. You'll have a wing mower on the right side, wing mower on the left side, and you'll have a mower on the front.
Neil: Is that these three ... these are three PTOs then?
Justin: They would be the three PTOs. To engage the mower, you would just turn a toggle on that activates your head. To turn it off, you would just hit the toggle.
Neil: You use that left-hand PTO to drive the hydraulics for the mower?
Justin: Yes. Other than that, your throttle was on a rocker. With this machine here, we have an inching pedal. So when we're ready to go into work mode, we take our direction stick, push it the whole way front. The machine will not go anywhere if your inching pedal's down. Once we want to start moving, we just slowly let off the inching pedal. When you're mowing, you can control the speed that you're going while remaining your hand on the stick for control. While you're mowing, you're mowing stick.
Neil: Oh, right. Okay. So I'm not driving with my hand...
Justin: You're not driving with your hand. You're driving with your foot. As we go along, if you want to go a little faster, you just let off the pedal. If you want to slow down, if you get into heavier brush and you want the mower to chew, you just push your inching pedal down and slow down and let the mower chew away.
Neil: This very simply is that it's setting my direction over here on the right-hand side, and then that's all of my speed control. There's no speed control over here?
Justin: Right. You can do the stick speed control, but when you're using a boom, a lot of your hand function is going on that boom stick.
Neil: Tied up anyway. So you decide, oh, I've got a heavy spot. I need to slow down. You're not coming down here. Right.
Justin: Other than that, pretty simple to run. We are in four-wheel steering so your turning radius in the fourwheel steering, it's not quite a zero turn. But I mean, it turns a very, very tight radius.
Justin: When you have the two wheel steer on you're turning radius will almost triple. It is just a very stable machine when you're turning and when you're mowing.
Neil: Let's try that here. So if we take the boom, let's do something a little silly, because that's what we do, right? Lift this up. I clearly have
Justin: You can actually telescope that thing the whole way out.
Neil: Very clearly no idea what I'm doing.
Justin: That's why I said there's a huge learning curve when it comes to this machine. Not everything is easy. Once you get time in it, I mean, you will learn.
Neil: I mean, there's how many, six, seven functions on that boom there in and of itself, right?
Justin: If we stretch this boom the whole way out, we'll keep it a little low to the ground here.
Neil: Yeah, try to tip it over. That's what I was going to try to do.
Justin: It is 24 feet stretched the whole way out. If we go up the hill here ...
Neil: You can tell, even from that little bit of motion right there, I've done videos with maybe three different booms at this point, there's very little rock from the machine when you throw that out. I mean, you could tell the stability of it is better than a tractor.
Justin: And this machine is all-wheel drive all the time. You cannot take it in and out of all-wheel drive, which is kind of nice, because it's one less thing for you to think about. But right now, we are on some uneven ground. You will see that mower tip down on the ground, but the machine itself does not feel unsafe. With that boom stretched the whole way out, we are turning downhill, which is generally a no-no when you have all your counterweight downhill. But you just easily come around. It's very stable inside here. I mean, you don't feel unsafe or like it's going to tip over.
Neil: No, not at all. I mean, even, even that little shimmy right there, just the thing feels a lot more planted, right?
Justin: With a flail head, it is a good amount of weight hanging out there. But it's simple, stable, even if you ... What we usually do is we will bring this stick up and rock the machine. So even with all this weight hanging out here, I mean it's still a stable machine.
Neil: Look at that. I mean, you really dropped the boom there and it just ... That's it.
Justin: Inside here, we're not rocking.
Neil: No, not at all.
Justin: You're not smashing into the side windows. You still remain pretty safe.
Neil: Give me a quick run-through on the screen up here. There's a lot more to this than it looks like than just fuel and engine RPMs, right?
Justin: All your functions are going to be done through this screen, whether you're turning your axle stability on or off, whether you're going to put it in two-wheel steer or four-wheel steer or crab steer. This screen here, when you go from four-wheel to two-wheel, you have to have your axles aligned. This is just a gauge so you don't have to be turning around looking at your wheels and tires. There it automatically pops into two-wheel steering. To turn it back, you can hit this and this will give your option for two-wheel steering, four-wheel steering or crab crawling. To get out of that screen, we can just pop back out of there.
Neil: Could you think, is there a reason you would want to crab crawl this thing other than you can't?
Justin: There could be if you're in a tight area or if you get into mud, you can crab crawl out of the mud against your ruts. It kind of helps you get unstuck. There is a function for that. Here you will have your working speed and your travel speed. On here when you go into travel, this one's set up that your backup camera will automatically go on. So when you're going down the highway you don't have to worry about somebody flying up behind you.
Justin: If you want the camera on all the time, you can choose to have the camera on all the time or have your gauges up. On the screen here, you can go day mode and night mode depending on what time of day you're working. This will be for notes. If there's any faults or gives you your information so your axle pivot lock is on now. So you can get out of there.
Justin: You can fold and unfold your side step here to get in and out of the machine. It is a hydraulic step. You can fold and unfold your step. If you're confused at what the controls do, like Neil has shown us here, you can hit Controls Help, and this will pop up all the functions that's on that joystick.
Neil: Cool.
Justin: It tells you what every button does, which kind of function does what. On here, you can go into a diagnostic screen so you can tell what all your hydraulics are doing. If you go back here, you can recalibrate it. If your axles aren't straight and you're going down the road, you can recalibrate your steering to make sure you are tracking straight. It'll give you your implement information. Right now our mower is disengaged. Tells us what our pump pressures are. This will give you more diagnostics about what's going on, pressures and sensors and that kind of stuff.
Neil: I don't know if you know this or not from the service side, would our techs carry a laptop to work on this thing? Or does this screen literally do everything? Justin: This screen will do everything. The only thing you cannot do on this screen is engine diagnostics. You have to have the Perkins program.
Neil: Perkins setup to work on emissions and that kind of stuff. But any of the booms serve a mower stuff is all done here.
Justin: All done through the screen. On here, here's also a reversing fan on this unit. So if you're in a real dusty environment, you can manually hit that reversing fan to blow your radiator out. It will do it automatically if you don't do it. On the screen here, if you want to monitor stuff separate, you can monitor your hydraulics. You can monitor your engine or your boom. You can have three functions at one time on this screen. If you're sitting in here and you're trying to run diagnostics, you can see what everything is doing.
Neil: All at one time.
Justin: If you don't want to monitor or the boom, you can do Miscellaneous and that will give your just miscellaneous information. Or if you do have the wide area mower on here, you can pull up the information about your side mower or your front mower. It does have USB logging. There is USB port on this screen. It helps the tech if you're having an issue. All you have to do is log your information onto the USB and send it to your tech. He will be able to tell you exactly why the machine's doing what it's doing when it's doing it. Other than that, it's going to be your DEF level, your RPM gauge, and your fuel gauge
Neil: Easy enough.
Justin: Easy enough. It looks intimidating, but it's really not hard once you know the screen. Neil: You can very easily just follow the icons and make your way through it. Justin: Once you're done working and you want to go to travel speed, return your stick to neutral. We'll hit the little turtle. It turns to a bunny and we're good to travel on road speed.
Neil: Now we're not using the inching pedal here like we were with the boom mower, right? We're just foot off the pedal and use the hand drive over on the right.
Justin: What I've found, it is easier to control the machine when you're in drive mode to just use your joystick. That's one less thing you have to worry about hand-eye coordination, your foot pedals. It's just easier just to grab a hold of the direction stick and use that. It will do 25-mile an hour in travel mode, and it feels pretty stable at 25 miles an hour.
Neil: If I'm coming up here, we want to turn around, we're going to do this in two-wheel drive here.
Justin: Two-wheel steering.
Neil: Yeah, two-wheel steering. There's nobody behind me so I'm going to crank this thing around. I don't even get to 90 degrees before hitting the white line on the other side. Then we back it up and go the other way.
Justin: It is kind of cumbersome in two-wheel steering. You would have to do a three-point turn on a road to get turned around. Or the trick to it is if we put this thing in four-wheel steering, make sure our tires are all lined up. So now that we're in four-wheel steering, we can make a complete U-turn and stay within the road area.
Neil: So I'm going from white line to white line. You don't even need a shoulder to be able to pull that off. If you do one side of the road and you need to go over and do the other here, there's not some wiggle around in front of traffic. You just throw that in four-wheel and crank her around, and you're off along the other direction. Justin: You don't have to worry about doing a three-point turn in the middle of the road with oncoming traffic.
Neil: And you think, I mean, this thing's not small.
Justin: No, it is not a small machine.
Neil: That's a little bit on the Alamo Mantis. Here at Messick's, we have nearly 30 salespeople and we sell a wild breadth of equipment. There are going to be particular people inside of our dealership that specialize on certain machines and are really going to know them well enough to understand them and be able to operate them. Justin, in particular here comes from a long history of a lot of time as an operator. Really gives him an edge when selling equipment because he can understand what things are like in the seat. Neil: If you're shopping for a piece of equipment like this, and we can help, this is a guy that really is going to be able to tell you whether this is the right machine for you. This is obviously going to be a little bit more expensive than going through an outfitting a traditional tractor with a boom mower. But I think it's very easy to see that the experience as the operator in the seat, the job that it's going to do, and the versatility that it potentially has, is worth a little bit of a premium over top of a little tractor.
Contact Justin for more info about the Alamo Mantis - (717) 367-0064 | justinm@messicks.com
Our typical customer for this tractor tends to be a small hay operator, hobby farm, small farmer for looking for a utility tractor. Generally, Kubotas do best in haying and loader applications. This tractor is an incremental step through the rest of the M series so it's replacing the M8560 and the M9960.
