Blue Mule
Gold Member
In 2016 my father bought a brand new eXmark E-Series 60” ZTR with a Kohler engine. He and I planned to share use of it for our combined 6 acres to mow. He’s a master mechanic with 50+ years of experience working on everything imaginable so he knows his way around a machine, but he went into the service area and asked the ZTR mechanics their opinions of which engine to get and they all said Kohler because Kawasaki was having issues at that time. The mower gets fully serviced at the beginning of every season, with anything additional it needs as the season wears on. We average about 85 hours per season on it.
In the last 9 mowing seasons the mower has needed:
- PTO switch replaced
- Brake came loose or wasn’t properly torqued at the factory and needed to be repaired
- Tire failure on left rear, not from a nail or anything it just decided to dismount itself
- Front tires both garbage, decided to replace with solids
- A stick hit the neutral lever under the machine rendering it stranded. Took forever to diagnose the simple lever as the culprit. Poor location.
And then last month at 750 hours the engine started to run like crap. Ended up being that the valves were covered in carbon to the point of causing the machine to idle poorly and run on 1 cylinder at times. This was repaired by spraying CRC intake valve cleaner into the airbox for 5 minutes, which resulted in a massive smoke show and eventually an engine that runs normally again. I’ve never seen anything like that happen before. I might start buying gas for it at only Top Tier stations to see if that helps any.
The deck spindles are getting noisy but we'll run 'em for a while longer because they are expensive.
That mower was close to $10k in Golden Era money, so today the same mower is north of $15k. I suppose that considering the acres of grass it’s mowed (probably somewhere around 1,000 total acres by now combined) it’s been a pretty good machine, but not perfect.
In the last 9 mowing seasons the mower has needed:
- PTO switch replaced
- Brake came loose or wasn’t properly torqued at the factory and needed to be repaired
- Tire failure on left rear, not from a nail or anything it just decided to dismount itself
- Front tires both garbage, decided to replace with solids
- A stick hit the neutral lever under the machine rendering it stranded. Took forever to diagnose the simple lever as the culprit. Poor location.
And then last month at 750 hours the engine started to run like crap. Ended up being that the valves were covered in carbon to the point of causing the machine to idle poorly and run on 1 cylinder at times. This was repaired by spraying CRC intake valve cleaner into the airbox for 5 minutes, which resulted in a massive smoke show and eventually an engine that runs normally again. I’ve never seen anything like that happen before. I might start buying gas for it at only Top Tier stations to see if that helps any.
The deck spindles are getting noisy but we'll run 'em for a while longer because they are expensive.
That mower was close to $10k in Golden Era money, so today the same mower is north of $15k. I suppose that considering the acres of grass it’s mowed (probably somewhere around 1,000 total acres by now combined) it’s been a pretty good machine, but not perfect.