Mower test & Review of the Cub cadet Pro z 972 sd (aka the Billy Goat)

Hit the goat. [Music] I don't think I'm getting the cup to death, Zoe. Yeah. Good thing the pacemaker's working. All right, today guys, we're going to be looking at this Cupcadet Proz972 SD in detail. This video is going to have two parts. Part of it is sponsored by CupCadet, and that's where their engineer comes in, walks us around the details of this machine and how it's built. The part that is not sponsored is the part where I tell you how I really feel about this thing. So, without wasting any more time, let's get into today's video. We were talking about how CubCadet actually has a reputation as a residential mower to kind of overcompensate with your commercial line. You guys went way overboard, way way heavier duty on this. Is that true? Wrong, right? That's a very true statement. We know that landscapers especially are going to put these things through the paces. They're going to be hard on these units. Uh municipalities do the same thing. So, we've actually triple plated this deck. There's three plates of steel on this deck. Three plates of seven gauge steel. The uh top plate and the front plate are seven gauge. There is also a ring on top of the deck around a spindle housing that is also seven gauge. Then there is what we call a boomerang underneath the deck that is also seven gauge that goes around the entire spindle plane giving you three plates of seven gauge steel that is over a half of an inch thick at the spindle housing. Uh it's it's the heaviest deck out there in that regard. Then your side skirts. We've all seen it. We all have them, right? We look at the side of our deck and there's no paint left on it, whatever color it is because we run them up against houses, foundations, fences, all that stuff. So, we did a 516 side skirt. I seen that right away. Most companies will use like a seven gauge side skirt. So, this is heavier than that. Then, we add this 3/4 in polymer wear guard to help protect that deck. So you can run that thing right along the foundation of the house, right along the fence row, get as close as possible without destroying the deck. And this is, of course, replaceable. We also have no grease fittings on this deck at all. There's actually no grease fittings on this unit. Um, and some people think, well, why'd you go non- greasable? Well, when's the last time you greased anything on your truck? That stuff's all sealed. Okay, right. Agriculture equipment is going to non- greasable because you can get such high quality bearings. Now, the bearing set that's in this spindle is the same bearing set that's on the front hub of halfton pickup truck. It's inch and 3/8 shaft with double rolled steel ball bearings. Very heavy duty. So, this deck we actually give a 5year 1750 hour warranty on or 3 years no hour limits. So, with a very heavy uh uh rear bumper plate right here, you can see how thick that is. It's 38 steel uh on the back bumper plate as well as the entire frame rails. That's going to give you a lot of protection back there for the engine. And then we also put very very small thing to put in here, but we actually have a hitch kit built in. You can easily flip that hitch plate around and be able to hook it bolts on with three bolts. You can flip it around and then you can bolt it back on to have it on the outside. The front end of the steering wheel unit is a cast iron front end. You can see this is cast iron steel. Okay. Yep. On our You can see how much material is just up in the front axle. This is also a pivoting front axle, which is going to give you a little better ride, a little better cut quality, and a little better hillside stability cuz these front wheels are going to pivot. But there's actually an isolator that's way up underneath the front of this frame. You can see it right here. Okay. It's a rubber stop, right? So, it's not going to be metal on metal. It's not going to be metal on metal. And one other advantage it has is if you have a pivoting front axle, which which some other people do. Yeah. If you need to get in that weird spot where there is a road sign or a tree right next to a curb and you need to freewheel one of the wheels off the curb, if this thing fully pivoted, it would go all the way down to the street. Curb's tall enough the deck hits the curb, sparks fly is not good, right? That isolator will stop that travel and only allows it to travel/ to 3/4 of an inch. So, you get the best of both worlds. It won't allow it to go down to the street on a curb, but you still get better ride quality, better hillside stability, and better cut quality cuz that front end is going to articulate over the ground. This is/ in steel and a very wide surface area, so you've got a lot of weight. 72in mower. This is a 72in deck on here. Yep. Okay. And the reason I say that is because I've ran a number of 72in mowers, and that is probably the beefiest front that I've seen. And this this wheel weight that's built into this this front wheel. I didn't even notice that is only for the dual wheel unit which which you're going to be running. This unit, if I understand you correctly, you can do a steering wheel or sticks. That is correct. Not with the dualies. The doulies are only a steering wheel. That is correct. Because with a steering wheel, it allows you to go to a steeper slope. Our stick driven machine, just like everyone else's, is rated for a 15° slope. That's what they're rated for in the owner's manual. Just by going to the steering wheel alone and still being the exact same unit, you go up to a 20° slope. So just by putting a steering wheel on this machine without adding the dualies, you gain an extra 5% incline. Correct. Why? That is because with a stick machine, your front wheels, you have no control of them. You know, a lot of people call them crazy wheels cuz they just bounce around and do whatever they want with them, right? You have no control over them. So we all know this. When you ride on a slope, those front wheels are just doing whatever gravity wants to do with them. Okay. Now, with the steering wheel, have the key turned on because this has electronic power steering. This allows you to have control of these front wheels. Okay. So, now when you're on that slope, not only are you going to be steering the unit with the transmission, you're going to be steering it up the slope. You're going to be steering able to steer it up the slope. Oh, brilliant. When you get into a bad situation with a stick driven machine, a lap bar machine, you we all know this. We've all been in this situation. I've been in it. You've been in it. Everyone that cut grass has been in it. And you're on a slope that that is pushing the limit. You'll start to slide. And once that machine goes into a slide, we all know we're just along for the ride and we hope for the best, right? Yes. Okay. You can get in a very bad spot where the machine could possibly tip over. The the front wheels are tied to the transmission. Okay. So, what's going to happen is if this machine gets into a bad spot and it wants to to not go anymore, instead of it sliding down the hill, because you have control of the front wheels, you're able to get the machine to basically just stop on the hill. And then you're going to be able to collect yourself, collect what you need to do to get the machine back out, whether it's you got to go get the truck and pull it out, another mo you got to pull it out, whatever you need to do. But you're not going to slide to the bottom of the hill, which is a very nice feature. And you just said the transmission is tied to the steering, right? When I turn, do these counter rotate? They do. And I think this is a great time to show what we call the cuckoo clock. It's kind of what we call it. This is This is kind of where um Does anybody else's counter rotate? No one else's does. I've never heard that. No, because everyone else has a lap bar machine. We have a lap bar machine. Every other manufacturer runs sticks. We're the only commercial zeroturn manufacturer that has a steering wheel driven uh zeroturn. Okay. So, when we take this plate off, this linkage here is what ties into the front end. So, this ties the front end to the transmission. So, as I'm turning this, you see this linkage right here? That linkage is going back to the transmission and is making the same adjustments to the transmission that you would if you were moving the stick side to side. As we turn this wheel and we get it into a zeroturn state, you can see these wheels are directly 90 degrees. I've moved this inside transmission all the way back to counter rotate the inside tire. So, when you go and you're making rings around a tree or you're going to the end of a line and making a zero turn, it's going to automatically counter rotate that inside wheel the right amount so you don't tear a turf up. I love DS. I I sure I will crawl in bed with a duel any day of the week, but they tear up. They're a threepoint machine all day and night. And if you don't get that, you're out patching divots. When you get to the end of the line, you're going full speed. You'll notice that the machine automatically slows down. So when you're moving this linkage, it's going to slow that unit down to where you can make a proper turn. That inside wheel is going to automatically counter rotate to not tear turf up. What do we have a commercial law on mower to do? Cut grass. Is that what they're for? Yeah. Who thought? I thought they were for just having fun on hills and testing out and doing interviews. [Music] Make that [Music] heat. So, I became almost too fascinated with just how nimble this machine actually was. And I'm going to show that to you in this video. But I put a drone up in the air. And this is my septic system. And if it looks like I have this figure eight around the cones, it's because I probably did this path at least 20 straight minutes. And look at the grass. You will see some tearing, but after going over the same spot over and over and over and over again and then putting a drone in the air, yeah, you might get a little bit. [Music] And one thing that CubCadet has always been known for is a high quality of cut. There's a couple things that we do in this deck to give you as high a cut quality as possible. We've all been mowing before and we'll get those stragglers sometimes popping up in between where the where the blades meet up. Y So, industry standard is is about 3/4 of an inch to 1 in of overlap from chamber to chamber to chamber. We do an inch and a half of overlap from chamber to chamber to chamber, giving us 3 in of total overlap in that deck. Oh, and what that means is you're going to get a lot less chance for stragglers and get a very nice even clean. Okay. So, under the deck, your blades are overlapping enough that you're not going to be able to get unless you're cruising cuz these things fly. They do. Yeah. This machine actually goes uh 12 mph. The single wield unit in the 900 series goes 14 m an hour. You know, you can design a deck to cut great in the north where we're cutting a lot of bluegrass, fescue. Then they sometimes might not cut well down in the south where we're cutting St. Augustine, Baja, Bermuda, Zoya. So, what we've done inside that deck is we've added removable baffles inside the deck. So, there's a removable baffle on the trim side, the discharge side, as well as back on the discharge opening. And in owner's manual, we give a really nice breakdown and grid for what you're cutting, how high you're going to be cutting that allows you to customize that deck for the best conditions uh that you're going to be mowing in. Wow. We all love stripes, right? We love to make lines. We got to make the stripes. So, we've actually added a striping roller standard on the back of the deck, which is right here. That's standard on a 7 and 900 series to give you that nice clean even stripe as well to help uh builtin stripe. Oh, wow. Okay. Dual fuel tanks. I mean, that's for balance, right? It is a little bit for balance. Yeah, this these fuel tanks will hold just shy of 15 gallons. They are dual feed though. Okay. So, we have valves set up on this on this uh tank setup. You can do it either way if you want to dual feed this tank. So it gets a little bit of an even flow on it. You can just open both of these valves up. If you want to mow and have some reserve, you simply shut one off. So you can kind of uh keep control of your fuel that way. This is a full airride seat. Very thick padding, very high back air. Airride. So there's actually an air compressor in this seat. As you can see, if you listen very closely, you'll hear it kick in. Is that standard? that's standard on this unit. And then those same ISO mounts that we talked about on the front end, we actually have on the seat. So you've got some ISO mounts right here on the seat. Y that are going to isolate some of that vibration. So your suspension on the seat's going to give you good movement up and down, but then those ISO mounts are going to give you good control side to side. So there's one last thing I want to show you. So usually when you get a lot more stuck, you do one of two things. you get underneath the unit, crack the valve loose on the transmission, pull it out in a proper manner so you don't damage the transmissions. But a lot of times we're in a hurry. We don't want to get in the mud and crack that valve loose. So we'll hook a tow strap up to the front of the unit onto another mower or to the truck and we'll just pull the unit out. It's not good for the transmissions to do that. So because of that, we built the neutral bypass for the transmissions right on top of the unit. We have it built right into the park brake. So, as soon as we release the park brake, we pull this lever up right there. It's in full neutral mode right away. Wow. Secondary benefit of that is you noticed when I set the park brake, it pulled that back into neutral. So, now I'm not uh starting the unit with a transmission that's fully engaged. So, those colder weather days in the fall when we're doing cleanups or in the spring, we're doing cleanups. Little bit less load to start the engine. Let's get this out and start testing it out. Oh, dude. I can't wait to see how you like it. It's going to be awesome. It's going to be cool. Let's do it. All right, so let's address the white elephant in the room right away. And it's this steering wheel right here. There's going to be some people that say they would not be caught on a job site with one of these things on their piece of equipment. And I'm going to tell you right now, those are the kind of guys that are more worried about what they look like than the work they are performing. Now, at first, I was hesitant about this steering wheel because after all, it kind of reminds you of a lawn tractor that your grandpa grew up with, right? Well, here's the thing. This has power steering assist, meaning that your front wheels will turn, but as your front wheels are turning, your back wheels are counterturning. Meaning that this 72in machine is insanely nimble, almost to the point where you can put this in places that a much smaller piece of equipment could never fit. In fact, I drove this straight up to the front of a deck and without going in reverse, I was able to go up to it and literally turn the entire machine and eliminate almost all of the grass. And why is that important? It's because it's going to cut down on your trimming. When you can get right up to areas that you could not otherwise reach, that means you're going to be getting off the machine less and doing a lot less trimming with this piece of equipment. I brought this up to northern Minnesota where I had two septic system pipes sticking out of the ground. So, I put two cones over the top of them. Now, this is a spot where I couldn't take my 61in zeroturn because it just wouldn't skinny around those cones. the 72-in CubCadet with the counter steering tires. I kind of was taken aback that it was able to even fit between these two cones. So, I kept going around and around and around. And you would think that a big machine with these aggressive tires would chew up grass. Not only was able to go around it, and I was so impressed, but it didn't chew up the grass. I want you to look closely at what you see. You will see that the grass is slightly chewed up in this scene. I went over this exact same spot at least 30 different times before I decided to put a drone in the air to show you guys just how nimble this was. There's a lot of features about this machine that are outstanding. One of the things that I needed to look for was ways to improve it, things that I just was not satisfied with. So, I started to beat it because it was handling my everyday workload without any issues. So, I started to take it into more extreme conditions than it's really designed for. I've taken it on slopes that there is no way I would have taken any other machine comfortably. Rigid has an app that allows you to measure slopes. Do me a favor, you guys. Don't push this machine to the extremes that we pushed it. I only did it to demonstrate what it was capable of, and I really don't want you guys getting in trouble. The machine is rated to 25° slopes. We did take it beyond 25°, but I don't want to show you how steep a slopes that we took it on because I don't want you trying to duplicate it. Stay safe out there, guys. I've buried it in the swamp. I've taken it through the woods mowing over rough terrain. I have got this machine stuck to the point where I had to get my Jeep to pull it out of the mud. I have chewed up and done a lot of things with this thing that you shouldn't do and I found no problems with it. But honestly, they're not paying me to say this. This thing is amazing. I love this machine. I would buy this machine in a heartbeat. The road speed is insane. The cut quality is amazing. The ability to climb hills is off the charts. It's not the greatest off-road. So, if you're going to go mudding in your lawn mower, which very few of us do, this isn't going to be the machine. Your Ventrak is going to beat this for your off-road mudding. But how many times do we actually go onto a commercial lawn mowing site and actually cut swamps with it? It's fast, nimble. There's just so many good things about this machine. It's hard to pick on it. Yeah, I was a little disappointed that I couldn't find more things wrong with this piece of equipment. I hope this video's helped you guys out. Let me know in the comments down below what you think of your CubCadet cuz a lot of you guys have ran them. Some of you guys are having amazing results. Some of you hate your CubCadets. This is my second CubCadet. My first CubCadet was a push mower and it was freaking phenomenal. I think they make pretty good machines. I honestly feel like CubCadet has a lot of quality. If you have an option to test one out, test one out. That's all I'm going to say because you're going to become a believer. You guys, God bless. Go get them and check out these other videos right here. All right, you guys. Let's see what my uncle Tom thinks. He's definitely not getting paid to make this video and he's going to tell it just like it is. He's pretty brutally honest about stuff like that. Cindy, you want to take over? Might be close to my hostage. You want to try this? No. Okay, Uncle Tom, what do you think of it? It's a goat. It's a goat. They got the wrong name on it. It's a goat. Only place another machine would do this. Unless it's a live animal and it's a belly goat. It's unreal. It is, isn't it? Yes. It's a It's scary. It And it's for as big of a machine as it is, does it feel nimble? Yeah. It's crazy, isn't it? Yeah. I when I when I started to use it Yeah. I was like going in between the cones of my uh septic system, right? Yeah. And I can't do that with my 42-in lawn tractor. And this could go spin circles right around it and cut. It's just insane how…