Mowing continental belton belly mower

kmosabe · Oct 1, 2007

I am posting on the Yanmar site because I believe some of you out there have these mounted under your tractors. Do any of you out there have pictures available of how you mounted them underneath the tractor. I know I can mount it, but would like some feedback on how you guys did it. Was curious how you adjusted the chains, do you just move the chains up and down manually to fine adjust it? What I am referring to adjusting is not the raising of the three point up and down, but how you fine tune it with ease without having to lift the chains up. Thought about a turnbuckle on the chains attatched to a flat angle iron mounted to the underneath side of the FEL brackets

lens12 · Oct 3, 2007

You can use a threaded J bolt to fine tune the higth & move the links for coarse adjustment.

bennevis · May 31, 2012

There is a man who lives a couple towns away from me & he works on these mowers all the time. He replaced a few missing stock pieces for a KTR-60 that I had. He can basically build them from the ground up. He does use both the stock chain & hooks or the optional deck wheels, but he also has his own modifications as well (some of them look pretty cool).
I think on some he uses a front hydraulic cylinder. I think I have a few pics of some work he did for me. Excellent work - runs like new.

I have a few before I took it to him & some of the work he did - I'll look some with the new paint job...

oldgrayfellow · Jun 1, 2012

Hey, i'd very much like to see whatever pics you've got of modifications, mounts, rebuilds, etc.
I just bought a KTR48 that needed some work, contrary to what the seller said.. (Had to rebuild one spindle and replace belts, and an oil seal on the gearbox.)

For mounting chains, it seems to me that the most efficient way to run them would be to just have the chains attached to the tractor at the center but then running out to the widest mounting point available at each side (right and left) of the deck. The stock system (or at least part of it) seems to have been just short chains running more or less vertical only from the center of tractor down to the two angle iron mounts bolted also near the center of the deck, as shown on the photo you attached (my deck also had the chains that way).
But it seems like that would be ineffective at preventing the deck from swinging sideways (which this design is prone to do because of the mounting system). The deck could pendulum-swing sideways quite easily from vertical chains, but if the chains extended further horizontally to the ends of the deck (instead of the center of it), sideways movement of the deck would be blocked because it would be trying to stretch the chains instead of swinging from them.

Some people have commented that a design weakness of these mowers is that you can't raise them very high. Don't know about the 5' or 6' versions, but with my 4' one (mounted on a 186d) i can get 6" or even 7" of ground clearance between the floor and the bottom of the mower deck (with the drawbar removed from the tractor). Because of the mounting geometry of these mowers, you can selectively raise the deck portion (front) of the mower by adjusting the toplink a little longer. It tucks up under my 186d very nicely. Another nice thing about the mower design is the adjustable telescoping action of the mounting beam, to allow you to slide it forward or backward to find the best position under a given tractor (and then you buy a drive belt of the appropriate length for that position).