I posted earlier in this thread about my results with my new Peruzzo Fox Cross 1600 Ditch and Bank mower ... in short, it does a great job with that after one gets over the challenge of learning to move the three different controls in the right direction.
I finally got a chance to use it as a field mower and here's my observations.
- It's a handful for my JD 870 on our hilly and still pretty damp field. The 870 handles it, but not with an abundance of margin, and it clearly burns more fuel than my old rotary.
- The offset is really handy cutting under trees, and I have a lot of them both around the edges and some in the middle of the field.
- I think I finally got the height set for best results. I started at max and it left a lot of skips. I set it down two holes and it wanted to dig in the dirt and found several football-size pieces of quartz that I had not found in 20 years mowing with the rotary. The hammer blades do not like carving quartz. I went back up one hole and it runs cleaner and so far hasn't found any more quartz.
- I find the cutting quality disappointing. See photo:
The actual cut quality seems to me worse than my tired old rotary. However the fact that it's running to the side of the tractor means I'm not running over the stuff first, which with the rotary causes a lot of "pop-up" an hour or two later. Even when I have to swing the flail behind the tractor it seems to do a lot better job cutting what the tires run over. So while the cut is pretty ragged the pop-ups and windrows are not there.
- I find the "safety link" to be a total waste, and an inconvenience. Peruzzo claims it will let the mower swing back if you hit an obstruction. But it only lets the right connection to the 3-point drop back 4 or 5 inches, so the mower, if extended will drop back a foot or so. But that's only if the link is in it's normal fully down position. In use it never is - there is no latching function so it's at least on a 45 degree angle most of the time when driving forward, and when going up hill it's fully back. See photo:
That changes the angle of the frame, as shown in the photo, and if you pull up to a tree or whatever with the mower offset and stop and lift the mower to back up it wants to swing forward as the link resets. A really bad design.
I think on balance it's going to work out, but I'm certainly not ready to sell my rotary yet.
