Neil from Messick's here today, out with a TerraKing TKV20 material collection system. We're going to walk around this attachment here to show you some of its features, maybe you're going to find that this is a way that you can really improve your fall leaf collection chores. The TerraKing TKV is actually made locally to us here, right down here in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
It's a company that makes this collection system and this is a hopper type collection system, specifically made for the Kubota BX but when you look around in here, it probably can be very easily adapted to virtually any small tractor. These guys are actually cool with us selling this thing just about anywhere around the country so we're going around this thing here today. If this looks like something that you're interested in, this is one thing we can actually help you with no matter where you are.
That's difficult for us to do on YouTube with a lot of the things that we sell. A lot of guys are going to prefer hoppers for a lot of your material collection needs over like grass catcher bags. Now, grass catcher bags, the normal bag or for the back of a Kubota BX is a 12-bushel bagger so you got these three big heavy bags across the back that are only going to handle 12 bushels of material and you want to empty and you've got to lift them out of the rack, have them over wherever you want to dump them at.
With a hopper like this though this larger containment unit is able to handle 20 bushels so not quite double what you can fit into those bags. That's really nice when you're doing things like light leafy materials and that kind of stuff, leaves are going to fill those bags really, really quickly. When you come to empty them, you certainly got a leg up by simply being able to do this.
How's that for emptying your hopper? The other functional end of this piece is the fan housing over here on the side, we always prefer when these fans are attached to a tractor's three-point hitch as opposed to hanging off the end of the mower deck. It's because when you hang the fan on the deck, you got that weight of this fan assembly hanging off the side, generally throwing your mower deck out of balance.
They're also typically driven off of a double stack end pulley which isn't nearly as clean and efficient as driving it off the rear PTO like you would on a unit like this. As far as the fan housing back here itself goes, it is a higher capacity fan than what you generally find on most OEM units. A little bit of inconsistency and what I was seeing in some of the literature and spec sheets, I saw the fan itself, spec is either a quarter-inch steel or three-sixteenths inch steel. Either way, that is a big heavy steel fan in an industry where plastic fans are surprisingly common.
You're going to notice that we've mounted this bag or onto the tractor using a Land Pride Quick Hitch. Mounting baggers is always a challenge on a lot of machines but this one is particularly easy. You're going to have your PTO shaft back in here to hook up but for the bagger itself, you've got parking stands on the bottom of the baggers so it can free stand by itself.
Then you can use your quick hitch and simply release your arms back into the bagger and pick it up with the hitch and drive away. It's one of the easiest to install baggers I've ever seen. If you're going to be storing this thing in a garage, TerraKing also has an optional caster kit that will put wheels on to this, that you can easily roll it in and out of a storage position if you're not using it year-round. One of the challenges of operating a bagger like this is knowing when it's full. All of your material is being collected back behind you.
Any of these kinds of baggers that they give you like a window to see into the back, it's inevitable that very quickly that window becomes something you can't see through. TerraKing though as a neat solution for this, they actually have an ultrasonic sensor that attaches right here to the back that's going to take a look inside the bag and give you a little meter of how full the hopper system is.
Once that starts to reach capacity, it will start beeping at you and tell you that it's time to go dump it. Original versions of this use some wiring that tied back in, there's some 12-volt circuits but the newer version of this is a lot easier to install. A simple module snaps right on here that's charged with USB. Just take the thing and plug it in to charge it off of a regular cell phone adapter and that's going to last a significant amount of time, probably about half a season or so of telling you how full your hopper is.
That's been a second or third generation now is a nice improvement that they've been making on this unit over the years. Now you notice here I do not have the two between the mower deck and the blower itself, that's because this is our stock unit that we have sitting out here in the parking lot. When you're going to go set this up for yourself though, you're going to need a boot that goes on the end of the mower deck here and goes back to the hopper.
It's an eight-inch boot, something nice and big to get that capacity grass and leaves through there. Nice, the TerraKing recommends that you actually go out and use the manufacturer's boot. A lot of times on some other units, they're going to use some generic boots or you got to cut plastic out or you have a metal one on that doesn't fit quite right but sticking with the OEM boot ensures that you're going to get the right baffling and everything that guide that grass material through the mower deck and get it turned and headed back towards the hopper.
You can imagine that this piece on the back of the tractor adds a significant amount of weight and requires a significant amount of horsepower to drive that large fan. This is only recommended on tractors with an excess of 19 PTO horsepower, so that is a basically 23 to 26 engine horsepower and above. It's not going to be enough tractor that had say, the BX 1880 or 1870, the 18 horse variants aren't going to quite cut it for you.
The other thing that you're going to be mindful of too is how much weight you have on the front of the tractor. For many of you, we're going to go through and recommend that you do not cut grass with your front loader on just because you got that thing hanging out in front of the machine. In a four-wheel-drive tractor, it's going to make it a little bit more difficult to steer.
When you go and you load up all this weight back behind the tractor, if you don't have anything in front of you, you're going to find the front end of the machine getting a little light. TerraKing recommends at least 200 pounds of weight out in front of the tractor so that can either be going and hanging some suitcase weights on to the front weight rack on your tractor or simply leaving your loader installed.
That's the TerraKing TKV material collection system. If this could be an asset to you this fall and help with your material collection needs, give our sales department a call. Those guys are available at 800-222-3373 or you can check us out at messicks.com.
