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We try to record what we do unique things with these machines to show some of the versatility that we can get out of a compact tractor. A lot of the apeel of this equipment is not necessarily just the loader and mower task that we so often talk about. 90% of the machines that we sell wiill go out with loaders and mowers to do those repetitive chores that people have but the real appeal of small tractors like this is in the huge variety of them it's that you can put behind these machines. As you own and operate a tractor like this, there are very few implements that we can fit up to a small tractor.
These things have become so popular now and there's such a huge variety of attachments that are out there that there isn't nearly an ending amount of versatility that can be found for these machines. One of these things is a sickle bar mower. You can see here on the back three point of the tractor we've installed an Enorossi or Rossi, we typically call them sickle bar mower. This is a six foot sickle bar down along here and it's a relatively inexpensive way to go out and mow down really high and thick brush. More often than not, guys will choose these when they want to reach over underneath of a fence row or down over top of an embankment.
Typically, rotary cutters would be used to cut high brush but this gives you that reach out over top of the edge in order to reach into another area. This being relatively lightweight can really be fitted behind just about any tractor. The way that one of these things works is that there's a PTO shaft coming out of the back that runs a gear and then operates these two pinions down here in the bottom in order to make the knives go back and forth in order to cut things. If you do hit stuff, the knife sections and stuff can be individually replaced in order to take care of repair or damage.
One thing guys often run into when they want to use an attachment like this on their tractor is operating this extra hydraulic function back here at the back. Typically, we, initially would look at this and say, "Oh, the tractor needs a remote" But in the case of this machine, the customer opted to use the hydraulics that were already on the tractor. We often forget that the front loader has two hydraulic functions for itself. When you operate your front loader, you can go up and down to raise the boom up and down and left and right in order to curl your bucket and even have a float function if you go the whole way forward and press this front.
As you can see behind me, we very easily unhooked the hydraulics from the loader because we don't need it when we're mowing and plumb those hydraulics back to the back sickle bar. We were able to do that simply by putting together a four-foot long hydraulic hose and just pushing it back here underneath the seat rather than having to go and install an expensive remote kit on the rear of the tractor. You can remember your loader hydraulics can be used for other things. When you have the loader on, if you simply unhook the hoses while the loaders installed on the tractor, the loader is not going to drop to the ground because the fluid can't go anywhere.
You can unhook your functions, leave your loader on the tractor or preferably, take it off and park it somewhere and then use those functions for something else. In our case here, we plumb those functions back around to the cylinder right here that raises our sickle bar up and down. I can show you briefly here exactly how that works.
From the scene in the tractor, to start our machine. Now, the three-point hitch control is going to move the entire sickle bar up and down. Then we took a loader valve here and we plug this into the left and right which would normally be the bucket curl in order to lower the boom down. This will move fairly quickly and you can see ideally when you do this you want to put a little restrictor valve in the line with the hydraulics so that it doesn't move as fast.
Once you've got that down, then you can use your three-point hitch to set your cutting height and you're using the cylinder to set the contour that you want to follow. We set this up on this stretch without using any additional hydraulic remotes. Ideally, that would be a nicer setup but this is a relatively inexpensive implement and really the only time that the customer was going to use this. We just simply plumbed it off the loader stick here.
Another thing that you could also do, we have on the bucket curl, if you put this on to the bucket raised position, you'd be able to push us forward into the flow position and allow the sickle bar to float up and down if you wanted to really have it right against the ground. More often than not, you want it up a little bit. Using this to set the angle and this to set your height. You're going to achieve that.
If you have any need for attachments for your tractor or you could use something like this, we are a dealer for this product and it's a relatively inexpensive lightweight piece that we're really able to ship to most places in the country for a very reasonable cost. If we can help you with an attachment like this or a Kubota or New Holland case tractor, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com.
