Can anyone post some pictures of hills

[roermo]

Lovemywoods:

I hate to be dumb here but seeing your picture makes me think you must cut that up and down not across. Iam I right. The tracks seem to show up and down.

thanks

Roger

 

[dirtworksequip]

I just measured the back side of a pond dam that I mow across slope with a JD 455 w/ 54in mower deck. It runs anywhere between 27 to 33 degrees or 64.9 percent. Thats with wheel weights,tire chains and the diff locked in. Thats about max for that tractor. I wouldn't even want to do half that with my 3520.

 

[daTeacha]

My wife's former place has a bank above the road with an angle close to the pic lovemywoods posted but not that tall. I could mow it with my old Cadet 109 if I sat on the high side fender while going across. The trickiest part was getting up there and then back down. I was also usually crab walking the tractor somewhat with the front about a foot higher up the hill than the back all the way across the slope. I never rolled the tractor but there were times the sideslip was too much to mow the whole thing.

Looking at that picture, I would guess the angle is very close to 40 degrees. Again, pictures are not very good at showing how steep a slope is. Maybe we should start including a level in the pictures.

 

[ratter]

I've got three pictures attached here. On the two shots, "path" and "from_side", I tried to keep the camera as close to level as possible to give a good indication of the angle. "Path" is the path I take to travel to the top of my hill. "From_side" shows part of the hill that I'm climbing. My neighbor can mow nearly all of it with his older Masseys. They're very wide-set, more of an orchard style tractor. Me on my 1540, I'll probably only ever touch about half of the hilly areas. The rest of it is way beyond my pucker factor.

"Top_down" shows the view from about 4/5ths of the way up the hill. That's the roof of my barn visible down there to the far right. There's a lot of climb in not much distance!!

 

[JerryG]

Is the hill in the first picture about 20*?

 

[ratter]

Is the hill in the first picture about 20*?

Jerry, can't say for sure. It's all one big hill, but it rolls and dips in various places, so there's anything from a couple degrees up to probably 40+ degrees depending on exactly where you are on the hill. But 20 is probably a fair guess for that particular spot.

That's another reason that I'm extra careful when cutting any of it myself. We've only lived here a year. I'm not familiar with the land yet. When you're mowing 8' weeds, who's to say what might be lying underneath!! I've been pretty surprised at how well the overgrowth can hide a change in slope/elevation. When my neighbor cuts a piece, I go check it out right afterwards so that I can see the true nature of the ground under all those weeds.

-Mike

ps - edited my post above. I originally said my neighbor can mow all of it. He can't - he can't do the 40-degree areas, obviously. Those are just woody and will remain so! He can mow the bulk of it though. And then there are some areas where there will be a strip of very steep land in between two milder areas. He'll use the sickle bar there.

 

[3RRL]

Lovemywoods:

I hate to be dumb here but seeing your picture makes me think you must cut that up and down not across. Iam I right. The tracks seem to show up and down.

thanks

Roger

I think you should re-read what lovemywoods wrote.

 

[Duke4AZ]

I have seen some pretty impressive hills in some of the pics posted out there, and some very pretty countryside as well. However, hills don't have to be big to field test the ROP system of a tractor. Attached you will see what I am talking about. As you can see, at some point the CG line exceeded the limits of safe operation, static as well as dynamic. Not to worry though, the tractor was fine, and once we came to an agreement, we have been able to log about 250 hours of safe and productive operation together.

 

[JimParker]

IF the bottom of the picture is horizontal, the angle is 20 degrees. IFthe bottom of the pic is horizontal, the vertical from the center of the ROPS will pass through the left front tire just inside of the center of the tread.
...
Guessing the roll center of the tractor/operator is about at the height of the center of the grill guard member just below the headlights, I'd say it's a long way from tipping over. The roll center is probably lower than that, given the mass of the mower deck and loaded tires.

Sounds safe enough, doesn't it? Now just imagine a small gopher hole just in front of the downhill front tire, and a "panic" reaction of turning uphill. The gopher hole causes the tractor to start tilting downhill, and the center of gravity begins to shift to the downhill side. The uphill turn effectively accelerates the shift (by moving the front of the tractor uphill, amplifying the downhill rolling action). Depending on how close you really were to a static rollover point, you may reach the "balance point" almost instantly, and if something doesn't stop the roll very quickly (like regaining firm ground with the downhill wheel, or turning the wheels back downhill), a dynamic rollover event is going to happen extremely quickly.

Stopping and doing the "pushing on the ROPS from the uphill side" to see if the tractor is "tippy" isn't going to tell you whether or not you might get into this dynamic rollover scenario... It's only going to tell you whether it's safe to get on the tractor at all.

Someone with a lot more "seat time" and I have said earlier that they always go slowly on unfamiliar ground, or when traversing a slope anywhere close to their maximum "pucker factor" angle. I think that's excellent wisdom, since it takes away one of the factors that can contribute to dynamic rollover - one the operator can directly control - and that's the speed at which things will happen. The slower you're going when you hit that gopher hole (washout, gulley, or whatever), the slower the tractor will react, and the longer you have to respond before you exceed the limits of the machine.

I learn so much from this forum, and I have so very much still to learn!

 

[JimParker]

...Surely you must have significant fixed wing time! Not that a rotor head couldn't think like that but... it was so complete, clear, and consise!!!

OK. I have to confess that I do have about 250 hours of fixed-wing time. (To go along with my 1,800 hours of rotary-wing time.) But I did have to promise my Army buddies that if I ever crashed one, I would make sure to wind up face-down, so no one would see my Army Aviator's wings!

In all seriousness, I was an Army helicopter instructor pilot, and spent the better part of one 3-year assignment training Reserve and National Guard pilots to fly using the earlier-generation night-vision goggles that had only a 10-degree field of view. (Imagine holding a pair of toilet paper tubes up to your eyes, and trying to fly a helicopter... That's about the same field of view you got with the old AN-PVS-5 goggles.)

Anyway, I got to teach them to do slope operations (landing and taking off from a slope) while wearing the NVG's. The OH-58 helicopter had a maximum slope operation angle of 12 degrees... I never saw a single pilot - no matter how good he was - sucessfully complete a landing on more than about 8 degrees of slope in daylight, and about 4 degrees operating with the NVGs... Such is the power of pucker-factor. The new-to-NVG pilots (many of whom had 6-8 thousand hours of flight time, dating back to Vietnam) would positively freak out when I would demonstrate a landing to an 8-degree slope with NVGs, and I would positively freak out whenever one of them tried to land on anything steeper! I got to see lots of videos of dynamic rollover of helicopters during my instructor pilot course, and it was downright scary to see the path the rotor blades typically took following a rollover! Right through the cockpit. I never really wanted to star in one of THOSE movies!

Trivia: In 1,800 hours of helicopter time, I logged approximately 6,800 landings - including well over 4,600 that were done as full-touchdown autorotations (no power to the rotor blades) during emergency procedures training. Never even put a scratch on one.