Testing Brush Mowers & Land clearing Equipment in Extreme Conditions

okay so let me ask the obvious question what are we trying to accomplish here guys meet Todd he's the president of quick attach which is a company that specializes in just building heavy-duty tools and attachments for equipment this is Shane he's been an engineer for Cooke attach for over 19 years and Todd and Shane are discussing why they should smash their brush more into a giant rock what does that make us better than everybody else well I don't know that it does make us better than everybody else it makes us good enough to withstand incidental impacts that you might come across surprises in the field they always they always happen it's gonna tear up the blades I mean this is a given but at least you're only out a couple hundred bucks on blades or something we know most brush motors don't have a stumped jumper they have that t-bar or they have some or other mechanism underneath there that isn't strong enough to withstand that or the boulder with the pressure relief valve to withstand this so I mean that's really what we're trying to show here all right where are you guys gonna be all right let me get my safe zone I'm gonna go over in here all right there's no wasps in here I [Applause] [Music] so the blades on this more are specifically designed not to break they're designed to actually twist and Bend but not to shatter because if those blades shattered and would send shrapnel flying could potentially injure people and actually pretty much destroy your mower let's take a closer look at this when he lifts this up [Laughter] [Music] Benten Benton didn't break that's the point but believes our ductile enough to withstand those impacts and not become shrapnel or projectiles that's why they're tested to that standard okay I think we did D end up destroying this one you guys remember last time we tried to do a brush bar video we said we didn't quite destroy memories like you didn't destroy it would you say we destroyed this one you guys yeah we yeah we wrecked the blade all right James will you hold this for me yep all right you guys I hope these videos helped you guys understand the key differences between brush mowers I don't know why I put that sequence here because this is not the end of the video it's actually just the beginning today we're gonna be looking at all of the different size brush bores from the tiniest ones all the way up to the biggest ones to help you guys figure out which one is right for you I mean these things range all the way in price from down at $3,000 up to $15,000 or more and they're not built the same by the time you're done with this video at least you'll have a good idea of which one to go out and grab if you're in the market for a brush floor [Music] so Shane you guys all six six different brush wars is that right action 1 2 3 5 4 6 4 skin tears and what 7 per skin 7 first kids 10 1 protracted 1 month 2 84 inches in here ok so 7 for skid steers and 1 for a tractor that's kind of yeah well we were there's a large spectrum of use so you some people are using it for grass some people using it for brush some people use it for trees ok and so if you can make a model that focuses more on just part of that spectrum you'll have better performance overall how is the guy supposed to know which unit to get when there's so much choice out there I mean we're talking about these guys are gonna be spending anywhere from $3,000 for the baby mower on the end up to 15,000 5 times the amount for the big dog that you sell down here and then there's other companies out there making them as well well hopefully we're gonna clear up that confusion today because we are going to cover when you want a direct drive or a right drive motor when you want to three or more blades spinning underneath what a stomp jumper is what kind of Stumpjumper you want and we're gonna start with what we consider to be their flagship model which is a model that has more features than most typical mowers out there and kind of go down from there and go up from there as well so let's do this thing this is this is kind of like your go-to model yep right here if we call this the brush buster okay most skid steers out on the market they're either small to medium sized because of the most economical most people aren't using them in contracting type you know jobs they're using and on the weekends or whatnot so the most common skid steers are let's say medium sized right and so we are focused on the medium sized skid steers is right here especially the brush Buster model but now there's direct drive motors there is right drive Moors it even call the right drive yeah we call them right angle drives so we got a couple examples here and you guys use both right yeah right so on our smaller mores where we're trying to maintain a higher tip speed we're using a right angle drive because we can use a two-to-one speed increase there inside of here so okay that's big because it allows you to use a larger displacement hydraulic motor and the reason we do that is because some of these skid steers you have to be able to meet the flow requirements of the skid steer itself without overheating okay and you know if you use a really small motor like you might have to on a direct drive then it's like breathing through a straw it's just pushing so much flow through that tiny little motor that things get hotter they overwork and they're gonna wear out quicker okay so here's the thing if I'm understanding this right inside the industry a lot of companies are trying to push direct drive only as if it's the new technology and it's a stronger version but if I'm listening to you it's not always the right choice it's gotta be the right choice for the right more right great okay we have a saying around here is more than one way to skin a cat and so you can use a direct drive and you can spin that disk slower but you're gonna have less energy because of the speed now a lot of times they'll make up the difference by using a heavier blade carrier so you can either have high speed with a lower mass or you can have low speed with a higher mass and come out with similar types of energy okay horsepower at the spindle if you know what I mean but is there conditions that you would want one yes or the other yes okay so most people are gonna move brush and grass in general they might wish that they could mow a 10 inch tree and and these mowers you can take down a 10 inch tree usually you don't want to do that all day as this is not the tool for tree cutting okay this tool is made for brush saplings and grass and most people that's what they do when they're clearing trails or mowing ditches or whatever they're doing the small to medium size material yep so we like to use a higher tip speed because it gives you a cleaner cut and you can boost the energy because of the speed of that rotational mass so we're using two blades that look similar to this and it's important that you make blades that have an offset if you want to do good mulching okay so we got this bolted to our blade care and this offset is keeps the blade down close to the ground so this offset is kind of a critical element to the success of the overall design right and the other thing about using two blades is that you could your blades can be longer overall that if you have a large Stumpjumper diameter with shorter blades wait a minute stump the blade carrier or Stumpjumper it's the part that the blades bolt to underneath and we'll show it to you later okay but the advantage there is that you can use a blade this blade is like 16 pounds and we have two of them so you have that spinning mass as well right but not only that but the mass is farther away from the bolt the rotational axis of the belief tree okay so we got high tip speed out here but we've got a lot of mass behind it at the blade can you help me understand the reason you guys have seven different units for skid steers because it's not a one-size-fits-all correct okay so can we kind of walk down through all of these and maybe you can help me understand the key differences between them so as I I was a consumer and I'm like I gotta spend a lot of money where should I hone in at sure okay where should we start smaller okay so now what would this unit fit on it would fit on what we call mini loaders and so an example of this would be what we sell here the genesis machine okay and they have flow rates maybe up to about 15 gallons minute and then the flow rate is pretty much it has to be part of that whole combination right yeah usually we see at least 10 gallons a minute they'll operate at lower flow rates but the performance is less so then you guys do a kind of a big jump off from this 42 to now these all look like they cut the seat yeah so what I did was I brought out all 72-inch mores but we actually sell these mores in four different widths so 60 66 72 and 78 all of them no just these two mores right here oh just the ten our tractor more we also have four whips or well again one more so again you can use the whip to help match to the horsepower of the machine okay so you don't want to put a 78 inch more on a really small skid steer because it's gonna again you're you're doing more work under that 78 inch circle it's just so BA yep it's got to be proportional it's just not gonna work okay so so from the outside they tend to look the same but they have different features which dramatically affect their performance we're gonna cover that right now as I'm looking at it if I look here right there where it attaches to the skid loader and then I look over here this unit will actually flow separately from the machine so that unit is gonna contour to the ground right give you an even cut right so you're gonna see this feature actually in action right here you can actually see the mower contouring to the ground separately from the skid steer [Music] one of the sales guys said nobody mo is a football field you're out here in the woods it's it's like this right yeah and the skid-steer is very rigid that doesn't have a suspension most of them so they're also bouncing around well you're missing stuff every time you you go over a bump and this allows the deck to stay in contact with the ground okay over uneven terrain okay now that's the rigid frame not the floating frame and so we're gonna go in the exact same spot show you guys the difference when your brush cutting one thing to keep in mind is the ground is never gonna be even and so you're gonna get a different height from one side of the blade to the other side but you're also like right here gonna be binding up and beating those blades into the ground with a rigid frame mower just something to keep in mind two other features that are really important on this more one is the rear roller so because this deck has to be in contact with the with the ground independent of the skid steer we use a roller in the back it serves two purposes one is it it is a rolling contact with the ground to stay in contact and it also shields the operator from material that's flying backwards yeah look at this so you got chains here to do it right but you're still gonna have stuff flying through that yeah this is gonna help knock it down this is gonna be more like a barrier the other big feature on this mower is the it has a safety shutoff so if the operator picks the mower off the ground the more will stop turning when do we want these bigger ones though well basically as you go up the spectrum and you're mowing larger material or if you have more horsepower okay that's why we have the top end these are both direct drive but we're start using larger and larger motors so on the lower end of the spectrum we're using Eaton for this one okay that's the motor for that one this is the motor for this one yep and where's and that's this is the motor for this one [Music] okay okay so you can definitely see the difference between the input the utility in the brush Buster oh okay so we only use the motors on our duro ler state mowers so this is a 2000 series 4000 series 6000 series as you go up the spectrum the motors can handle more more horsepower so they can handle higher pressures and higher flow rates okay and you have to plan on what speed you want the thing to turn it and try to match the motor size to the flow rate so where is the motor on your biggest one is that it right there yes okay wow that is a definite size difference reasoner right so not only is it larger but it's a different style of motor this is a radial piston motor so it's got five Pistons in here yeah working like a radial engine on an old World War 2 plane is kind of same orientation yeah so they have really high startup torque yeah and piston motors are really efficient yeah they are yeah oh there have a higher efficiency than Jareau lor type motors they're really expensive okay you have to be mindful of the cost there's a lot of mowers out there that are using cheaper motors from you know international sources but these are american-made I mean the motor Chinese motors and wasn't gonna say that but yeah okay and these are these are even Oklahoma all right Shane let's go underneath and see what's going on here if you don't mind sure so a couple of points that we want to bring up here one the first of all is the deck itself the structure yeah on our new brush buster we've got a ring here that runs the full diameter underneath and that's for a couple reasons but the main reason is the stiff in the deck it's another stiffening agent but it also helps kind of keep the material from wanting to climb on top of the blades it keeps it down when you're talking about components that you want to last a long time so there's when you hit something like a rock you're not going to see these rocks you're gonna hit them these blades have a certain amount of flexibility to them which I they're hard to show here but they'll actually deflect and go over some obstacles and then come back street so the reason we want that is because you'd rather have the blade flex a little bit then snap off a shaft or bust something else upstream is that not just the way everybody does it well when you use larger blade carriers this part here larger diameter and you use shorter blades the blades are a lot stiffer and in the blade carrier itself is a lot stiffer so that's why you have to use bigger bearing carriers on these larger mowers because all the shock loads going into the shaft on these smaller mowers a lot of the shock load gets eaten up in the blades themselves we use a blade carrier and we sometimes call it a Stumpjumper or a dishpan because it uses a spin formed quarter inch thick plate of Steel and it's backed up with a one inch bar on the backside where you where the blades bolt the reason for that is that you have a sceeto effect when you come up to obstacles that will help ride the deck in them everything right over the top of obstacles right over the top right some some mowers just use like a bar or some of them use a blade care that might be a laser-cut plate this may be triangle shape or whatever but this again adds to the longevity of the components because you're less likely to see those big shock loads you were saying off-camera that most Rushmore's for a tractor are made like a tin can yeah there a lot of people buy tractor mowers for more than just grass yeah and that's fine we you know there's dozens and dozens of manufacturers of those we want it to be unique and so we've built a mower deck that's based on a heavy skid steer deck and so you can go and mole trees down with it if you want by backing into them the back side is open and it's it's got a heavy construction so you can really do pushing with it you can mow grass with it too just fine but you're gonna have the added capacity to mow down trees so this this mower realistically it's meant to move forward see right through the grass right you're driving in the grass it's lawn in the back but if you came across a bush or a tree you would then back into it right and it would snake it out yep okay one of the other things that I need to bring up is there's companies out there that are claiming like your midsize brush mower over there they're saying all day long they can Maul 10-inch trees and they're making kind of like these big claims and paint pictures and guys heads that we've got to really clarify what that means yeah so it's it's it's easy to use a spec and try to sway the consumer and so a common spec is the mass of the blade carrier and also the size of the tree yeah but you have to be realistic with those claims so any of these mowers you can mow down a 10 inch tree if you wanted but it's not always the right tool for the job in 10 inch trees if you're gonna be doing that full-time or a lot of trees that size you need to be doing using mulches not brush more brush so you can do it sure you just realistically it's not the right tool for the right job alright so how big was this one well 13 the long ways is a little oblong alright you guys I hope these videos helped you guys understand the key differences between brush mowers there's a lot of choices out there and it gets to be very confusing that's why Shane and I got together to hopefully clear clear up some of that confusion let me know what you think in the comments down below what are we gonna do next gen we're gonna tear up some stuff with grapples sweet so make sure you guys stick around this video has been brought to you by quick attach without their help I couldn't have done this you guys wouldn't have this information so I'm giving a big THANK YOU to these guys you guys go check them out where can they find you at quick attach comm and eight six six four two eight eight two two four exactly god bless you guys go get them and check out these other two videos here one of them is gonna be the grapple video see you next time all right guys if you're wondering if quick-detach actually makes their stuff heavy-duty I'm gonna show you something here you see this this is the GoPro mount that Shane made for his GoPro and here's the magnetic GoPro mount and you can buy on the market you'll wonder if quick attach makes their cup heavy-duty they make it anything like their gopro mounts I'd say you're pretty safe