Neil, from Messick's here up in our service shop. Today I'm going to go through on this Kubota ZD Zero Turn Mower, and show you how to level a mower deck. Mower deck that's out of level can cause a whole host of cutting problems and performance issues. Generally, when a mower deck is out of level, you'll generally see that your one side of your cut is just a little bit higher than what the other side would be, leaving that step at the end of your deck. If you go through a couple steps here with me today we can eliminate that problem, make sure your tractors performing as well as possible. 

The very first step in leveling a mower deck, actually does not begin with a mower deck at all. It begins with the tires. The very first thing you're going to want to do before starting this at all is grab a tire pressure gauge, go around to your tires, and check and make sure they're inflated to the proper PSI. Importantly, make sure the left and the right side are exactly the same. If these are wrong, they're off. When you go through and do this leveling procedure, if you have to go back and fix your tire later, you're going to throw everything that you've just done completely out of whack. Start here, run around all the tires on your machine and make sure they're properly inflated. 

Neil: The reason I'm using the ZD is so that I can flip the front end up, and show you the adjustment points and the right places to take these measurements. When you look at pretty much any mower, regardless of brand or model, they are going to have these same adjustment points. Generally, it's going to be screws at the top of the point where the mower deck mounts to the tractor, but you're going to loosen a jammed nut and turn a bolt in order to make that adjustment. 

When we do the left-right level on the mower deck, we need to take a tape measure or some measuring device in order to measure the left and the right side of the deck and to figure out how high off the ground it is. I flip this up here to show you an illustration. When you look at the underside of a mower deck, there's a lot of baffling and a lot of variety on the bottom side of the deck. On the top side of the deck, oftentimes you'll find curves and indentations, mower decks are not say square things. 

Generally, when we're going through and making these measurements, we want to make the measurements off the mower blades themselves as opposed to some structural part of the deck. By going to the blade you're going to know that you're getting a true measurement, and you're not checking, say, a baffle at the end that might be a little bit lower or an opening it's a little bit higher or you're going off the top, it might be on an air tunnel. The only real way to do this is to measure off the blades, you're going to consistently get it right that way. This BX mower deck is a good example of what I mean by air tunnel. 

If you look at the construction of this, back here where the pulleys sit, the deck is a lot lower than up here in the front where the air is supposed to be flowing through. A lot of guys sometimes you'll see want to do this with a bubble level, like you would use in your home to level your pictures on the wall, right? Really, we discourage that because when you go and you lay a level on here, you don't know exactly, is this actually flat, it's hard to say, right? 

Again, we're going to go back in saying the consistent way to do this for every piece of equipment that's always going to give you the best proper result is doing it off the blades themselves, and not off of one of these top surfaces with a bubble level. 

Neil: Now, that we've established that we need to be measuring off of the blades, the very first thing that we're going to do to go through and make this measurement is to put the deck down into your cutting height. If you take my height dial over here and dial the mower deck to the height that I'm going to cut at, and then lower it down and set it down on top of the height stops. I would discourage you from doing this adjustment with the deck raised up in the air or the whole way down to make it easier to get to the nuts. Generally, you want it on those stops so that it's resting in its operating position. 

In order to make our adjustment, the very first thing we're going to do is reach down here underneath the mower deck, and rotate the blades, so that they're sticking 90 degrees out to the side of the mower. Once we've done that, you could do one of two different things. If you have a tape measure and you can wiggle it back underneath there, and get a measurement off of it, that's fine. We use these blade adjustment tools that you can very easily take lower down, slide underneath of the blade, and then push down until they come up in contact within tip of the blade. 

This is going to tell you your level, and it's also going to give you a little readout there of exactly how high your cutting height is. Remember, on your tractors, your cutting height as far as inches goes, is not determined with any numerical scale on your tractor, because the adjustment nuts up here are going to throw that measurement off. A little tool like this or your tape measure will tell you exactly where your mower is set at your given cutting height. We're going to go around to the other side here and do exactly the same thing. Right here sits my blade at 90 degrees, we're going to come underneath of it. Lift this guy up, and check and see where we're at. 

It looks like we are a quarter of an inch off. One of the importances of having a shop do what's called a pre-delivery inspection on a piece of equipment before it goes out, it is not at all unusual for equipment from every manufacturer that we deal with, not to be perfectly adjusted out of the box. Keep that in mind, especially if you're buying box store tractors, and that kind of thing where there's certainly not a whole lot of care taken to the prepping of equipment before it goes out, adjustments like these need to be done. There's certain process by guys that know what they're doing to make sure equipment is going to perform properly. 

We're going to go ahead and work out that extra quarter-inch to make sure our deck is perfectly level. In order to make my left-right adjustment, I'm going to come over to these two adjustable nuts here on the left-hand side of the mower deck. You're going to have a jam nut on the bottom, and then a height adjustment nut on the top. All we're going to do is come over here and just break this loose for the jam nut, and then take this deck, and make the adjustment to bring it to match the other side. 

While I'm making my adjustment here, and I've got it, just turn my nut till I'm in the right position. Come back down here and either pull your tape measure back out or readjust your tool. I've got two with the same left to right now. When I go retighten my jam nuts, I'm only going to retighten the rear because the next step that we're going to do is for leveling this thing from front to back. I'm going to make that adjustment using my front height adjuster. 

Now for our front to back height adjustment, we're going to do the same thing. We're going to rotate this blade 90 degrees now, so rather than being out the side, it's now from the front to the back. 

The important thing that you want to remember when you make this adjustment is that this one is not supposed to be level. You actually want to set up a mower deck like this, so that the blade tip is down about a quarter-inch more than the back is. It should be towed forward just a little bit. That's going to give you the best cutting performance, the best mulching ability of your mower deck, and give you that best cut. Keep in mind these things actually cut better and properly with that front toe just down a little bit. 

Our front back measurement there is spot on and it's got that one set up properly, but if you had to make that adjustment simply on your left and your right side, you can really choose either the front or the back to make that adjustment. Just make sure you're making the same thing on either side. After you're done you might want to go around and just double check again and make sure that you got all of your stuff right, and nothing has worked around because you've been down there pushing things around. Pretty easy to do. 

Like I said you could do it with a tape measure or one of these blade measuring tools that allows you to do it up off the floor without having to wiggle that flexible tape down around underneath the deck. We'll look and see, don't usually have these sitting out on the parts counter, but we're going to try to see if we can dig something up, and link it to this video because this little tool makes these things a lot easier to do than trying to wiggle around with a tape measure. Taking these couple of steps with your mower, I'll say probably once a year just because things are going to jostle around down here and adjustments are going to work loose. 

It's going to make sure that you have the best possible cut for your piece of equipment. If you're shopping for a piece of machinery and we can help, or if you have parts with service needs for machines you've already got, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373, we're online at messicks.com.