Will I tear up my Woods rotary mower? Or should I just buy a HD version now?

[nikdfish]

FWIW, I'll pass along what the John Deere sales guy said when I was putting together our initial 3038e & equipment package. He said the main difference between the light-to-medium duty rotary cutter I was considering (Frontier RC2060) & a medium-to-heavy duty cutter was the thickness/toughness of the deck. He predicted that the most likely damage to the RC2060 if I over-did things was to bang up the deck & skirt - that the PTO shaft, slip clutch, gearbox & blade were pretty much the same as those on the heavier unit. If I wanted something that could take heavy use year after year without showing marks to get the heavier unit. I went with the RC2060...

So far,what I've seen is pretty consistent with his comments. I have inadvertently run over some hidden items that have made a heck of a racket and slipped the clutch enough to hear the blades slow down. The only noticeable damage that has done has been to put dents in the deck that popped paint loose on top in a couple of places. Other than that, the only damage I've done is bending up the chain skirt mount a bit, probably from backing into brushy areas & putting a bend in the tail wheel yoke when I got hung up on a log one time that had been hidden in some brush I had backed into.

Nick

 

[Grandad4]

Piston, by all means, take your friend up on using his mulcher to get started. Maybe he can blaze a few trails through the property that can be the kick-off point for your work. That way you can do the rest in stages, nibbling away at the margins of the trails.

I've done some clearing where we went through the property with a chainsaw to fell anything we didn't want to mow, cutting as flush to the ground as possible, and then mostly backed over any remaining heavy stuff with the cutter, so we avoided driving the whole tractor rig over a bunch of saplings. As others have said, eventually you'll snag something when you drive over heavy brush, and that kind of mowing has got to be hard on the equipment.

As for the mulcher leaving stumps, they do eventually deteriorate. Often we'll come back the next year and pop them out with the FEL (toothbar helps for this).

Best of luck. It sounds like you'll be busy for a while on that. FWIW, we're also starting a cleanup this fall, but it's mostly deadfall and such. We bought a new logging winch to use.

 

[Baby Grand]

I have a BB60. There is no way I would even try to cut 3" saplings with it, unless they are balsa wood. It's a great cutter for what it's meant to do - 1.5" or less. My opinion is colored by the fact that I have mostly hardwoods here. A 1.5" hickory tree is a jarring thing to shred. Can't imagine anything (including my nerves) surviving 3".