Light To Medium Duty Flail Mower Advice!

[Molalla1]

From everything I have read and experienced with my 8' Rhino flail with huge, heavy hammers: you will get as good if not better of a finish cut with hammers than with grass knives. The hammers will allow you to hit things you did not expect, with little to no damage. Plus, maintaining about 20 hammers is a lot better than maintaining 40 plus knives. In short, the manufacturers claims of grass knives being the way to go over hammers for a nice finish cut, seems to be bunk to me and many others who have actually used both types.

I'm not so sure about this . . . I have a 8 ft. flail with the hammers, and a 5 ft. one with knives . . . the smaller 5 ft. cuts like a golf course . . . the larger hammer flail leaves a good cut but not as good as the smaller/knife one but it can really tear down some nasty jungles.

 

[DieselBound]

I'll have to agree with Molalla1's comment about hammers vs knives. I just put on my 6' RC to cut some 9' tall grass and realized that the RC actually does cut as well as my 7' flail with hammers. For me I only need a decent cut. The flail does a good enough job on my "lawn" type grass, and it is better for working around all my trees and ditches (the later the big reason I sprung for the flail- hydraulic side shift allows me to keep more distance from ditch edges and trees [I'm still not sure if that is the case for my fencing, as I tend to try and really get close, which the flail WILL do, but at the risk of snagging the fence! - my 6' RC doesn't really stick out in which case I just measure my distance to the fence based on tractor's distance from the fence]).

Knives can put up with a bit of woody debris, but I wouldn't expect them to be used as chippers. Hammers, as I've found, also are really good for grabbing wood and sucking it up inside the flail: had an instance of one piece of wood jamming the flail and causing everything to come to an abrupt stop! Knives will just bounce around. Hammers are aggressive with woody debris/brush. Knives are aggressive with grass.

 

[wirlybird]

From everything I have read and experienced with my 8' Rhino flail with huge, heavy hammers: you will get as good if not better of a finish cut with hammers than with grass knives. The hammers will allow you to hit things you did not expect, with little to no damage. Plus, maintaining about 20 hammers is a lot better than maintaining 40 plus knives. In short, the manufacturers claims of grass knives being the way to go over hammers for a nice finish cut, seems to be bunk to me and many others who have actually used both types.

This is great to hear. I'd really rather have the hammers for those unexpected things that don't belong in a field like stick and branches!!

I'm sold on hammers then.