Dan in MN
Bronze Member
How often are you going to mow? Just keep in mind that once that brush is down to 2 inches
its very easy to manage and turn into good sod if you want.
if you want to mow faster your going to need power and a gear drive mule.
Most of it will be at least a foot tall when I mow it, the bigger areas will be hit probably 3 times during the summer. To do it more often would require the 12 ft batwing that I really want, but there's no way I can justify $9k unless I had some other work with it. The stuff I'm mowing is outlot areas for our 30 house neighborhood, there's a small amount of pay for it but not nearly enough to justify a bigger expenditure. I'm mostly doing it just because I want to.. Going from a '53 Golden Jubilee and 68" Value Leader flail last year to something bigger this year for both tractor and mower.
It is a fallback for a lot more than just flails. But x HP can cut y acres per hour. Assuming you are power limited if you double the size of the mower you half your ground speed & you still mow the same acres per hour.
Personally I prefer a wide mower & going slower as it means a smoother ride for me & my equipment.
The rotary cutter rule of thumb is 5hp per foot of width. While that is only a ballpark number it's as good as any for a starting point for a rotary or flail. If you don't have the tractor yet & you are the impatient type shoot for a little over the rule of thumb. That way your spine & terain smoothness are the limiting factors, not you engine. With my 7' flail on my new L4060 (40 engine HP -5-6hp for my 6,500' altitude HP tax) I could definitely use some more HP to keep from slowing down. 50+HP isn't a bad target for a big Cat1 or a Cat2 flail.
For me I would prefer a wide mower and going fast.... :drink: I want to spend as little time as possible, which then of course becomes a fight between what I want and how much money it makes sense to spend... A Woods BW12 would be perfect, I figure it would take about 1/3 the time to mow it all as it did last year with a 68" flail (over twice the width and probably 50% greater ground speed) and then I could cut more often which would look nicer and keep the weeds down. Can't justify the cost though, so I'm back to thinking 8' flail and 50-60 hp tractor. Still haven't gotten a return call on that Alamo flail, the guy to talk to is in Florida on vacation...