We're out here today with the Kubota F Series front mower. Take a quick walk around this machine here. We'll show you some of its features and options. There's some really unique applications for front mowers and we sell them into a lot of surprising applications. A lot of time these are going to places that really have a lot of acreage to mow, where guys are going to be sitting on a machine for six, seven and eight hours.
These are typically a lot more comfortable to run than what a zero-turn mower can be. Now, because they have four wheels, much more comfy suspension oriented seats, it just isn't nearly as fatiguing to bounce around on one of these for several hours as what it can be on a zero-turn. There's also a lot of attachments that can be put on these as well, so there are a lot more versatile machines than what a zero-turn mower is that can really only mow grass, right?
A lot of time these are going to be sold to school districts and stuff that may use them during the summer time to maintain soccer fields and those kinds of things, but then in the winter time they're going to put snow blowers and brooms and that kind of stuff out in front of the machine in order to take care of their snow removal needs, or even install a cab on the machine to keep them warm while they're doing it.
By no means is this a single-purpose machine. You'll always see them with mowers on the front at some point, but there's a whole host of accessories that can be put on the front of the machine to make it a year-round tool. Kubota sells this in two different models, an F2690 at 26 horsepower falling underneath the requirement for a Diesel Particulate Filter, and a 3990 at 39 horsepower, providing a high horsepower and very capable option.
If we flip the hood up of this, this is the 39 horse model and looking in here from the side, you can see that it's turbocharged with a Diesel Particulate Filter on the back, and a large four-cylinder engine down here underneath the hood. This is going to give a lot of horsepower for demanding applications. Most of the time, this 39 horse model is sold with a 72 inch mower deck, but Kubota also offers a 100-inch option.
A large deck that is actually five separate mower decks that can flex and move. That is a deck that's typically geared towards golf courses and turf applications, not towards thick heavy pasture mowing. It's a niche that needs to be put in the right application, but can do a lot of very nice contouring and that kind of stuff where our big fixed decks cannot. The machine has a lot of horsepower for some of those really demanding jobs.
The 26 horse model is available in either a four-wheel drive or a two-wheel drive rear axle. You can see here that our 39 horse model has the four-wheel drive on the back. These are rear wheel steer machines, which makes them very maneuverable. Another great application for these are places where guys would like mowing efficiency from a zero-turn, but because of hills and that kind of thing can't operate a zero-turn mower safely, so by being rear wheel steer, you can make some very, very tight end turns with this machine, and have a lot of that efficiency while having the safety of four-wheeled drive.
From the operators' platform, I have a handful of control, so over here on the right hand side I have my yellow lever, yellow on any piece of equipment is typically related to the power take off, so by moving this lever forward, I'm going to turn on my mower deck on my front PTO. The black lever here is going to hydraulically raise my front mower deck up and down, and the orange lever back here, orange lever is always being related to movement on these machines, are going to give me a high or low operating range for my hydrostatic transmission.
For my pedals, I have forward and reverse right here in my hydrostat. I have a brake right up here and a difflock over on my left hand foot. Up on the dash, I have a lever for a tilt steering wheel, so I can move this into a comfortable position, a throttle up here on the column where you'd find the turn signals in your car, and then a digital display up here on the dash. This is the same digital display the Kubota uses in the ZD Series Diesel mowers.
It gives some digital readouts for things like fuel and temperature, will give you my engine RPMs and hour meter as well, and then some lights around the side to give me indicators for am I in four-wheel drive, do I have my glow plugs on, am I out of fuel, or my four way's turned on, parking brakes, PTO and the indicators on here for the DPF. This is a Tier four machine, so it has a Diesel Particulate Filter on it. Typically, that DPF is going to go through a burn cycle between every 20 to 40 hours or so.
In a mowing application like this, this is a great machine for these emission systems, because the emission systems work best when they run hot and under load, which you are always doing on a mower, so for the most part on a machine like this, there's nothing to worry about as far as the emissions go, you just crank the engine up and go hard. Front mowers are really easy to service compared to their zero-turn counterparts, because the mower deck is not buried back underneath the machine.
All the bits and pieces are really easy to get to. The grease zerks on the spindles for instance, are all right here at the top of the spindles. If you need to grease the drive shaft, the zerks are right here and exposed and easy to get to. This is also a flip-out lower deck, so we can use the machine to lift the lower deck up and then this included handle here to stand it up into a forward position, and I'll show you here how that works.
The first thing we want to do is to pull the two pins out of the back here on these support rods, so I can lift the lower deck up just a little bit and pull that pin out to release the back of the deck. Once we pulled our two rear pins, we need to check the angle of our drive shaft. If you flip up this cover right here and take a look at the U-joint, you're going to rotate this, so that the U-joint is at a position that it's going to allow the mower deck to hinge back into the tractor.
If it's at a 45-degree angle or something that U-joint is going to bind when you push this back, so it needs to be in a 90-degree angle, so that it can rotate smoothly to go straight forward. Once we've done that, we're going to start the machine and lift the mower deck up in the air. Shut the mower off, hop up, and then there's two rear scalp wheels that we need to release from their locked positions. On the left and the right hand side at the rear, there are these two wheels.
You can see here it's locked in place with this pin. By pulling the pin back and flipping the wheel front, you're going to allow the mower deck to be able to easily flip forward, and that needs to be done on both sides. Once you've released those wheels, you can then come around to the machine here and grab this handle. This handle is used to take the gas strut right here and take the pressure off of it, so you pull forward with the gas strut, compressing it, and then once it's in its position, come around here to the right, lock this lever in place, and then you can use this to push and lift the machine front, lifting the mower deck.
This is most easily done on asphalt. Me back here in the grass, I need to fight a little bit because this bump's on the bottom, so once it's in its full upright position now, you have very easy access to the underside of the deck here, to scrape out grass that me plugging up down here or change the blades. To release the mower deck, we're going to reach down here to this locking pin in the back, rock the deck froward a little bit to get the weight off of it, pull the pin, and gently lower the mower deck back down again.
Once that's down, we can then just hop back to our scalp wheels, pull the pins out of these and drop them back into their locked positions. With that now down, you could take your handle, push this back down, and let the gas strut back out again, and then put the handle back into its storage position. That's some of the features and functions of a Kubota F Series machine. If you have any questions about a machine like this, or you have any parts or service needs for your equipment, give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com
