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Neil from Messick's here. We're out here today
with two of our popular subcompact tractors again,
and today we're going to walk around and look at the baggers.
One of these things most tractor companies don't do a good job doing,
is giving you a whole lot of information about some of the more unique attachments.
So we had happened to have two machines here on the lot today,
both with baggers installed.
So we'll go through here take a look at these two machines
and compare the way these baggers were made.
In Kubota's own literature you're pretty hard pressed to find
a whole lot more information about this bagger
other than like one picture of the back of it, and that's really unfortunate
because it's quite cool and it's got a lot of good stuff going for it.
My favorite thing about this bagging system has always been that the fan
does not hang off the end of the mower deck. If you look at most other tractors, zero turns,
or on garden equipment, typically the fan sits off here in the side
is driven off a double stack pulley down here on the end.
Rather than doing that on this tractor, Kubota puts the fan back here
at the rear of the machine, and runs it off of a PTO shaft off the back of the tractor.
So that keeps all of the guts of this big bulky assembly and everything
off the end of the mower deck.
Why that's important is because these are suspended mower decks,
they hang from the tractor, they're not made to ride across the ground.
And so when you have all the additional weight of that fan
hanging off the side of the deck,
you basically throw your deck completely off balance, right?
These are made to float from left to right, and if you have all that additional weight
hanging over here you're basically throwing off
the balance of your mower deck all the time. By keeping all those components back here,
they're a lot cleaner, they’re a lot easier to take on and off,
and it keeps the weight off the mower deck.
The bagger mounts to the tractor here using the lower three-point hitch arms,
they come out and pin there on to the bottom, and the upper top link that comes out here
to stiffen the top of it.
The three-point hitch linkage is also made to move up and down as well.
You can't have that on this mower deck bagger setup,
because you don't want to drop your mower deck down
and drop your bagger to the ground at the same time.
So when you put this bagger kit on,
you come along with these short links over here,
and these brackets in the back
that you can pin your three-point hitch arms into place so that they don't move.
The lower arms here can support the bagger, but you're still free to move your mower deck
up and down at the same time.
The PTO shaft is right on here, slides right on to the rear PTO
just like any other implement does. And the cool thing about these
is there's no locking pin in them, you simply push it into place,
and then when you fold your bagger up and stiffen your top link,
it holds the PTO shaft in place so it can't come off.
So when you want to remove this guy, the only thing you need to do
is put your parking stands down, pull your lower links off,
unhook your top link, and just drive away and your PTO shaft will simply come unhooked
on its own.
The part on the end of the mower deck down here is called a boot,
and that's not a Kubota term that's an industry term.
Anytime you're putting the piece down here on the end of the deck
that collects the grass and turns it around to some kind of bagging attachment,
it's a boot.
To remove the boot, you really only have two pins down here to pull,
so you have a bracket that's added right there for the front,
a bracket here at the back, you just pull those two pins up
and this whole thing comes right off. That's very very easy to remove.
When you need to empty your bags here you simply lift up the hood,
and when you lift you hear that click sound, that's a spring loaded pin
sliding into the back there that holds the thing up.
Once you've picked it up, then the bags here are locked into the back of this frame
with a little mounting tab, so when you lift up just a little bit
you can now lift the bag right out.
The nice thing about that mounting tab is that it holds the bag in place,
so if you're out here sitting on a slope or something
and you've got a 75 pound bag full of grass, it's not going to slide out
and fall out of the back of this thing, it is positively held in the back here
and then also secured by the hood.
To drop the hood back down again you just reach over here,
pull your spring loaded pin and the hood drops right back down into place.
We set out here to do this video today partly because we had a 1 Series Deere
that we had traded in that happened to have a bagger installed,
and a Kubota with a bagger installed in stock at the same time,
like what are the odds.
One thing that I was wholly unaware of was that we really have a lot better bagger,
and this is something that I've never heard Kubota say before,
or use as a competitive comparison, or ever even make an effort to point out.
But there's a lot of things here that
I think I did this in some other Deere videos too,
I expect better.
Let me show you some of those places, particularly around the back here
is where most things stand out to me.
There's a lot of things in here in the mounting of this
that just seem a little odd to me.
Okay so Deere uses this mounting frame down here in the bottom
in order to support the bagger, the three-point hitch arms
that you see here aren't attached to this thing at all.
There is a tubular piece of metal that comes down here
and is held on to the hitch with bolts, like literal bolts, not pins,
not quick release, no nothing.
So if you're going to remove this entire bagger assembly,
you've got two options, you can pull these two pins out right here
and lift just the bags in the frames off, which is an option,
but you are lifting the entire weight of this thing,
there's no parking stands, there's no nothing, this thing is just going to flop off the back.
Once that's come off, you're left with this L shaped piece down here
and this T that goes across the top that's still attached
to the back of your tractor, you can't go use your three-point hitch
or punt something on the back because this thing is here,
so you need to go get your about inch and a quarter wrench
and sockets and you would need sockets because these nut heads are down in a hole,
in order to remove this bracket to free up your three-point.
Certainly tool is certainly not quick release,
and certainly not well engineered. I go back again, this is a Deere,
like you're better than this, right?
The hood is something they actually did do a fairly good job on.
You can reach down here underneath, pull a little lever,
and this whole thing goes up with a gas strut, that's good.
One thing that wasn't so good though was that there's nothing
that holds these bags in place. You'll note that I pointed out in the Kubota
that there's a tab at the back of the bag, so when you put the bag in
it actually sits down and is held there by something,
and all during the time that we've been picking over this thing
we keep doing stuff like this, like oops.
It's only held in here by sitting on top of this channel
with the hood coming around the back. We go back to my hillside scenario again,
if you're sitting on a hill with your bags, and you've got some weight in here,
these things are able to slide right and fall right out of the back
without being positively locked into the frame in any sort of way.
I can't say anything good or bad about this,
but one thing I thought was interesting walking around back here
you'll see this bagger is not actually centered on the back of the tractor,
it sits wholly off to that side probably about a solid foot or so,
which again, it's odd.
The mounting of this just seems like it could be done a lot better.
Another thing that I noticed here, that I wholly was not aware of before,
was that this mower deck actually does not float in this direction.
I was pointing out on Kubota that having the fan
off the mower deck is a real positive thing because you're not hanging
all that weight off the side, and I came over here pushing down on here
expecting to see this flex a lot, and to be frank it's only wiggling under here,
there is actually no left to right flex on this mower deck.
The Kubota will have leveling rods across the deck
allowing the deck to move in that direction, and on the John Deere it is fixed,
it cannot float that way.
In their case, hanging this big heavy fan off the side
may not be a bad thing, it might actually be okay
because the deck is not supposed to move that way.
I'm not sure though on the 60 inch version if that's built the same way.
Kubota does do their small mower decks,
the little 48's and stuff don't have those flex arms,
the bigger decks do.
I have a 54 inch John Deere deck today,
the 60 inch deck might be built differently than that.
But you will see the fan itself is hanging off the end of the deck
and driven off of it's double stack pulley down here on the end.
We're going to take a minute here and try to remove this thing.
First we're going to have to take this chute off the top here
that's held on with a spring loaded thing, that gives me rear chute there
that I can take off.
With that off, I now need to work this lever to release the double stack belt,
and can I lift this off now?
I can’t swing this way without releasing the belt.
Hey did you take the fan off the end of this Deere mower deck?
How did you get the fan off?
So you had to take the shield off?
Well, I don't have a wrench out here. That's bad.
After some finangle and a banging around here,
we're coming to the conclusion that you're not really
supposed to take this thing off.
In order to remove it,
there's a double stack drive pulley back inside of here,
but you need to get wrenches in order to remove this cover
in order to take the belt off, once you have the belt off,
now this thing would swing away and lift off.
Looking here a little bit more closely, I suspect the recommendation
would probably be that you're supposed to leave this thing in place,
there is this cover right here to cover the chute up
so that you can kind of plug this thing off, and then release the tension on the belt
so that the fan doesn't run anymore,
and it's just basically going to pack the grass down in there
and then drop it down if you don't want to bag.
The one downside of that is the whole time you are going to be shoving grass
into your fan, and doing that is going to cause the tractor
to wind roll all the grass over here on the side
because the deck is side discharging and then it's coming to a place
that the grass can't go anymore.
Looking to me could be wrong, let me know in the comments
if I'm reading this wrong, but this bit here is really supposed
to stay on the tractor unless you're willing to get some tools out to remove it.
Okay, so more fun with the fan. Like we're talking,
this thing probably doesn't come off, if you're going to leave it on,
you disengage the belt so that the fan stops running,
and this cover is supposed to come over top, but this tractor is about two years old now
and you can see this cover is really bent up and deformed from
having a chute here in place.
Bungee strap maybe across this to keep it closed
so that grass doesn't come blowing out of this back into your face.
We'd done another video about a month ago comparing a 1 Series Deere to a BX Kubota,
and one thing we kind of grazed over when we did that,
and didn't spend a whole lot of time on was the mower decks.
We got a little bit of flak in the comments for that,
because a lot of guys had the impression that the auto connect deck
is like some kind of 21st century innovation
that it's capable of all kinds of incredible things.
To be completely fair, we tried.
We did put our best effort forward to try to do a really good demo
of exactly how this deck works. Initially, when we had had one before,
I wasn't able to figure out how to get if off and we were pretty rushed for time,
and didn't really spend time on it.
This time we did, we got the deck off the tractor,
and then spent two and a half hours getting it back on again.
One of these things that you'll find with these drive over mower deck systems
is that, if they're not adjusted completely perfectly they don't work right.
I would say that not just about Deere but about every manufacture
that has ever built a drive over mower deck.
It's a lot of things have to be adjusted perfectly in order to work.
In the case of this one, we were really getting stuck
because we couldn't get the PTO shaft on the middle of the mower deck
to accept the copper properly. And we spent, not even kidding,
two and a half hours with guys down here lifting and jostling this thing
back into place. So we are not going to do that again.
I will spend some time on the decks themselves though,
and if I get one of these that works, I will absolutely do it, just not this time.
The Deck itself, if you look at it compared to the mower deck of a Kubota,
is a lot smaller and lighter and it doesn't have nearly as much steel in it.
If you take a tape measure here, and we measure across this thing,
this deck is five inches deep from the bottom of the deck
to the top of the shell. And when I measure to the top of the shell,
I'm going to the higher part of the shell up here,
back on the inside where the pulleys sit,
this is pushed down about another three quarters of an inch,
it does create an air tunnel around here, around the front which might be
what they're going for. But that is a lot shallower
than the Kubota deck. If you come over here with me,
and pull the tape measure on this guy.
This would have the same air tunnel type setup,
but this sits just shy of 6 inches.
So about three quarters of an inch deeper around the top there.
You'll notice that the wear edge down here in the bottom,
this thing that you would crash against rocks and stuff,
is a lot more heavier on the Kubota.
There's more steel in there than there is on the Deere.
So there's some differences there. The pulley set setup.
This is a single V-belt right down here that runs between the different pulleys.
If I walk back up here to my Kubota again,
I could show you pretty easily here. Just spin side cover off.
Underneath that cover is a big, that inch and a quarter thick,
double kevlar V-belt.
So the drive belt on here is quite a lot heavier than the one on the Deere.
Again, to be completely fair, that's Deere's 54 inch mower deck.
I don't know if the 60 inch is any different, this is the one that I've got here.
The reason why we care about depth in a mower deck
is that typically deeper mower decks are able to clean out better, right?
If you go into thick heavy grass, a deeper mower deck has more room
for the grass to swirl around down there. It's able to breath and clean out better.
As a whole, deeper mower decks typically handle thick heavier grass
than shallower ones do.
Another intricacy that we find with these drive over mower decks
is that, and this model in particular,
they really eat up a lot of your ground clearance underneath the deck.
If we start the tractor up here and raise the deck up the whole way.
Take our trustee tape measure here, hop down here below it.
Now granted I'm in the grass, so take this for what it is.
But I've got basically just over three and half inches of clearance
between the ground and the bottom of the mower deck.
So in the Kubota mower deck here, you can see, if we take our tape measure
and we measure from the bottom of the deck down to the ground,
we are at five and a half inches of ground clearance underneath the deck.
Why that matters is that a lot of people choose to still use the three-point hitch
on their tractor, and say go road to tow your garden
without taking your mower deck off, right?
On the John Deere with that, out that extra two inches,
you're a lot more apt to be dragging the mower deck through the dirt
and those kinds of things, and not able to do as many chores
with the mower deck installed as you could on the Kubota.
That's a little bit of information about Kubota's bagger for the BX Series,
and a comparison to the John Deere version of it.
Coming out here today,
I had no idea that these things were as different as what they are.
Coming away, I get out with an impression of this
hey low that seems to exist around John Deere's equipment
and not understanding why it's there.
You're in a much much better place with this tractor.
As far as the buid of the bagger, the thought that seems to be put into
how it's installed on the tractor, the ability to take it on and off,
the ability to work with it with some of the components in place
are just vastly better.
If you have questions about these products, we can help you make a purchase,
give us a call at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373,
we're online at messicks.com.
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