Flails can't mow tall grass?
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7' tall grass. No clumping. No wrapping up of/on the rotor. It's running hammers and it have knife/blade shredders. It wasn't my intention on using the flail this way, it was just a test. My intentions are for cutting such grass with my RC: most of the stuff for concern is easily 7' and higher by the time I'm able to get around to it (too wet to get it while it's shorter). I was quite pleased to find that I was able to tackle 4' to 5' tall grass w/o concern: more that I can get on the first mowing of the season with the flail makes the flail a bigger win for me (7' flail vs 6' RC; less passes means less turning, which means faster, though running the flail is a bit slower).
My flail picked up an 8" diameter chunk of wood and stopped it and the tractor cold: only time I'd ever experienced this (in some 650 hrs on this machine). No damage. I told the vendor about this and he said that the flail is NOT a forestry mulcher! Well, yes, I'm well versed in dealing with heavy brush and KNOW to use RCs in such instances, but this was one of those accidental encounters. My point here is that flails aren't necessarily fragile things. Are they more maintenance-heavy than RCs? Yes. Rock and stump mowers? Nope. I don't have rocks to contend with, nothing of size that presents any significant issue: rocks that might cause trouble are ones in known fill areas and they've all been tamed (not sticking up above the surface to present issues). In my use I'm unlikely to break a hammer: although the flail is new to me (this year/season), if I haven't broken a hammer up to now I'm unlikely to do so in the future.
My 6' RC has a 1/4" plate steel welded on the top. Previous (and only) owner used it commercially. It chewed through a TON of rocks (deck was blasted through)! Beat the snot out of it but it still does the job: I'll run it into anything w/o fear (flail, nope; but, the flail cost me about 3x the cost of my used RC, so I'm inclined to not get as daring with it).
