Stay up to date with your reel or rotary mower’s sharpening and maintenance schedule to create picture-perfect cuts and smooth playing surfaces. Here are the top items to keep in mind this summer.
Keep your cutting units sharp
Sharp cutting units provide the best after-cut appearance and allow your mower to run more efficiently, which helps extend its life and your productivity. Dull reel blades and bedknives or dull rotary blades produce poor after-cut appearance and can hurt your bottom line.
Sharpening guidelines for reel mowers
When sharpening, it’s important to follow each step precisely to maximize the efficiency and health of your mower while keeping safety top of mind.
Sharpening guidelines for rotary blades
Dull cutting edges and/or bent blades will compromise your rotary mower’s quality of cut. Here are some guidelines to ensure you properly sharpen the blade to maximize cutting power and efficiency.
How to maintain and adjust reel mower cutting units
Perform routine checks on your reel mower’s cutting units to ensure quality performance and great after-cut appearance by focusing on these common areas: maintaining light contact, keeping cutting edges sharp and adjusting height cut accordingly.
How to choose a rotary blade or bedknife
Picking the right rotary blade depends on the job. Likewise, when using a reel mower, the right bedknife makes a difference. Take a look at these different types of rotary blades and bedknives and the applications they’re designed to handle.
Maintaining reel mower performance
To accurately maintain the height of cut and performance, routinely check the reel bearings, bedknife-to-reel adjustment, attitude adjustment, roller parallelism and height of cut.
Maintaining reel mower quality of cut
Several factors affect the quality of your reel mower’s cut, and the lower the height of cut, the more critical these factors become. Some factors include turf conditions such as excessive thatch, “sponginess” or attempting to cut off too much grass height, and they may not always be solved by adjusting the machine. Other factors that affect the quality of cut include tire pressure, engine-governed speed, reel and bedknife sharpness and more.
For more information, contact your local Toro distributor or visit toro.com.
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