Let's take a quick walk around this machine here and we'll show you some of the different features on this four-wheel-drive mowing machine. Well, Kubota has always been known for there compact tractors. They've also always had a line of residential mowing equipment as well. A lot of customers come into our dealership looking for BX series tractor, we may find that they don't need, the ability to have say, a front end loader or a three point hitch or the heavy axles that come along with these subcompact tractor. In those cases, sometimes we find that there needs are better met by a garden tractor. Really, the market for garden tractors is not nearly as big it used to be.
Because we see a lot of customers now migrating towards zero turn mowers or toward subcompacts, but there is still a class of people where this is the right tractor for them. Generally, we find that for the customer looking for a significant piece of equipment, or for the guy who would like to buy a zero turn mower and is looking for the efficiency of a zero turn mower, but has slopes. If you ever get a zero turn mower with the grass being a little bit damp or you start to get onto some more significant slopes, you'll find that zero turn mowers break loose and slide on hillsides fairly easily is it.
I myself, have had customers injured by driving zero turn mowers on unsafe condition. A lot of times we'll try to guide those customers into considering a GR series tractor. There's several features here on this machine that get it close to zero turn like performance. We'll take a quick a walk around here and point some of those things out.
One thing you will find if you do internet research on this model is that the original GR series tractors really had some mechanical issues, to put it quite frankly. The very first model that come out were GR 2100 and the GR 2000. Those machines had several places in this advanced transmission, where Kubota should have been using bearings and instead chose to use bushings. What had happened is those machines started to get hours on them, where the bushing started to spin inside the transmission housing, effectively ruining the transmission.
That issue has been fixed now in these later series machines, we're not saying near the failure rate that it happened with that first generation product. If you're seeing some reviews on this tractor that aren't exactly glowing, that maybe the reason why. That old series had issues, to put it quite frankly. Kubota handled it at the time quite well. We did a lot of repair work under warranty for customers. But that model now is reaching 10 and 12 years old, so support for that has fallen off at this point.
The defining feature on this tractor is Kubota's glide steer four-wheel drive. This is a tractor that is, obviously like I said four-wheel drive, but is always in four-wheel drive. There is no selection on the tractor to engage or disengage the four-wheel drive system. That's all managed for you automatically. If you notice here on the front tire, there's a little cam with a rod attached to it and what will happen is as this tire is turned to a particular steering angle, this rod will engage a clutch in the transmission, that will disengage the inside rear tire from the four-wheel drive, but allowing the front tires to be engaged.
Effectively, what that does is when you go into a tight turn, the inside tire won't push the tractor out of the turn anymore and the front tires being engaged will pull the front end around. The end results of that is if you do a doughnut with this tractor, the 54 inch mower deck version can have a circle of grass in the middle about this bigger round. When you're looking for that zero turn type mowing efficiency, by being able to make quick turns and stuff at the end, a GR series tractor can get very close to that kind of efficiency with this glide steer system, but because it's four-wheel drive it's going to give you a lot of that hill stability, where zero turns really just shouldn't be.
We're going to do quick steering demo here just to show you exactly how this glide steer system works. I'll try to talk it through here while we're going. We'll just fire the tractor up and as I go forward here, I'm going to take my wheels and bring my wheels around and you're going to get to a point, right about there, where the inside tire back here on the rear is disengaged for the transmission, while the front tires are still engaged. You can see the steering angle that I can crank these things around to.
Now, remember my front tires are still engaged to my four-wheel drive. Now as I give these thing power, they're going to pull the front end of the tractor around, making a very tight turn. We go back to our mowing application again, if we're going to circle a round the tree, say we're going to circle around the tree, you got to trim around them. We just bring this thing to full lock and give it a little bit of power. If you're watching on my inside tire right here, this is going to give us a really tight and easy way to make that trimming really efficient. We really looked at GR series tractors for those customers that would like zero turn mower, but for safety factors for hills and that kind of thing just makes this a better choice.
From the BX series and the rest of Kubota's tractors series, also comes a lot of tractor technology that's not often found in garden tractor. In this case, it's hydraulic mower deck lift and a hydraulic wet PTO. In this tractor to raise your mower deck up and down, you're not using an arm operated lever with mechanical height adjustments. You're simply raising this up or raising this down and letting the tractor hydraulically lift the weight of the deck up and down. In order to change your cutting height, you simply reach down here between your legs and you have a little dial that you can turn that has mower decks stop positions, to change your cutting height right here from the seat.
In order to engage that mower deck there's a lever that you push forward right here and this is a hydraulic PTO clutch. Again, on most lawn equipment, you find you're pulling a button out in order to engage your mower deck, what you're typically doing is engaging a magnetic PTO clutch. The way that works is when you pull button out, it takes that magnet and snaps the clutch together.
The end result of all that snapping is typically, as machines wear and age, we end up replacing PTO clutches, because it's a lot of load that's hardly engaged and snapped into place when you pull that button out. When you do a hydraulic clutch, and this the way clutches are done on all of our larger equipment, you bring this lever forward and it uses hydraulic pressure and wet plates to bring those together, to engage that PTO. It's much more robust reliable system, that you'd likely won't have problems with as machines age.
The GR series has two different engines options, a kohler gas model, that's equipped with a 48 inch mower deck or Kubota diesel model that can be come with a 48 or 54 inch mower deck. There's about a thousand dollar price spread between the two different engines and for my money, that's typically money well spent. The engine that's in here is D782 Kubota diesel engine, it's right about three quarters of a liter and produces 21 horsepower. This is an engine that we would estimate is going to burn right about a half gallon or a little bit more of diesel fuel per hour. The fuel economy of these little diesel is absolutely phenomenal. It will give you a lot of torque and a lot of fuel economy and really is easier starting as well. A lot of the perception that people have of older diesels, with the blowing black smoke and hard to start in the winter time, really doesn't ring true anymore.
I would much rather walk out here into the parking lot, heat the glow plugs on this engine for five seconds and crank the thing right over, than worry about flooding an engine with a choke or fighting with a gas engine to get it going. For my money, I would off for the extra $1,000 for the diesel, but if you don't want to handle diesel fuel, the kohler engine is a ubiquitous engine that's offered on a lot of equipment as well.
That's the Kubota GR Series Garden Tractor. If you have a yard that could use a machine like this gives us a call at Messicks, we're available at 800-222-3373
