TrailBlazer TB-One Front Mount Rotary Mower (starting at $3895)

assists helping hand with your name Neal from Essex here today out with the titan implement trailblazer tb1 this is a really cool concept in a new type of attachment for a small tractor that's really been getting a lot of attention and a lot of interest on the Internet today you know walk you around this piece show you a little bit of the mechanicals and talk through the operational aspects of this mower obviously the idea of having a mower out on the front of your loader is really appealing right it's now very easy to drive over top of things going forward rather than having to say drive over stuff with your tractor before it gets to your mower if you're trying to operate while going front so that's cool also really nice that it's on a skid steer coupler very easy to drive up to throw your two levers to lock it down and off you go no fumbling around with your three-point hitch so that's a big Pro driving anything hydraulically is a really interesting concept it has a nice small eaton motor on the front and simply just takes a feed in a return in order to power it we'll talk through how these hydraulics are plumbed a little bit later so cool functionally you've got a lot of different options on how this thing is going to work and it can work in a lot of different positions so I've got it set up here just sitting straight out in front of the machine but this arm here can actually bend to put it in some other different configurations I'll show you here how easy that is to do so the first thing that we're going to do is start the tractor up raise the loader up in the air and point the mower straight down so once you flip this thing vertical you now have the weight of the mower hanging on this pivot over here now there's a couple of locking pins in here I'm just basic hitch pins that you pull out and they're gonna unlock this thing and allow it to move I stupidly I can't say anybody else has probably ever done this before I tried to do this before reading the directions and did not pivot it down and made a complete out of myself as I flailed around in the parking lot trying to manipulate this thing she will swing away now once we're off to the side we've got an option of a couple different positions here so you can see here there's two pivots okay so we've got a pivot back here against a quick attach plate and then a pivot right up here on the mower itself and this is going to give us several different positions that we can put this thing into in order to say mow over the side of a bank or clean up some tree lines and reach out away from the tractor and a way that you could never do with her traditional mower so you've got five different positions right here that we could pull down this locking pin I'm gonna bring this thing basically out here to straight out and again we could take that slightly up or slightly down and then using this black rod right here we're able to adjust this at being up 90 degrees or being a out flat with the rest of the machine now these adjustments while they're very easy to make one thing that this does not do well is allow these things to float so every position that you're doing here you're putting a pin in and putting this mower in more or less a rigid position and from my playing with it before one thing I was a little disappointed in was that these things can't float so say this deck right here for instance you know it can pivot back and forth if we don't lock this in but with its weight and not likes a good anti scalp right rails and stuff on here does cause it to want to dig in and not contour the way that you might want it to so in the future I think would be interesting to see if these companies can come up with a way to say you know put some bigger shoes something on the front of this or maybe a little trailing wheel here in the front that helps these things contour a little bit better because in their offset positions they do tend to dig in a little bit but the setup is very cool you're able to position this mower in a way that you would never be able to put a normal rotary cutter so what tractors are appropriate for an attachment like this obviously the demands of this thing are really a little unique right it is hey 42 inch rotary cutter but you don't slides it onto a tractor that you would normally put a 42 inch rotary cutter on to the hydraulics on this are going to need between 9 and 14 gallons per minute that's generally gonna put you into the size of say a Kubota stander 2 L on up in the new Han line you'd be into say a Boomer 30 the mid-sized frame and up into their bigger compact so it's not something for say a subcompact or a really small tractor to get enough hydraulic flow out here you need to have that 30 horse or so tractor so if you remember back to a prior video that we did we talked through a calculation that you could do that takes hydraulic flow and puts it in terms of horsepower and number that we can understand a little bit better if you go through and you take this nine to fourteen gallon per minute range that you have here that's essentially between 12 and 17 engine horsepower so significant I mean more than enough in order to run a mower of this size but not the amount of horsepower that you generally would say available have available on the PTO of a tractor in order to run the mower so kind of keep that in mind if you go into grasses say 3 feet high this isn't going to perform as well as what a PTO powered mower would because you're just not delivering that amount of horsepower out to it so when we're looking for applications like this we need to be looking for the ones that it's not for the everyday mowing right it's for those unique challenging places where you just can't get a traditional mower it's in the back of this tractor we have the titan power pack and this is a unique piece and the principle reason why we're choosing to work with this particular company with this mower the power pack brings a couple different things to this equation so most of your small tractors are not going to have enough hydraulic flow to really run this thing up to its potential really maybe only scraping up against the minimum the power pack gives you more than adequate hydraulic flow in order to deliver a lot more horsepower out to that mower and make it work its best it also addresses the concerns that we have of feeding this thing and properly returning the oil of sump as this becomes a self-contained unit the power pack with two hoses that run straight up to the mower you can plug the thing onto your tractor and go with no worries about how you're gonna get this thing hooked up this also provides two added benefits in ballast it weighs several hundred pounds additional ballast to help offset that mower and it also helps with your cooling to figure most of your tractors are usually gonna have six or eight gallons of hydraulic fluid in the rear end you're generating a lot of heat on this unit and driving that heat back into your tractor where there is no active cooling and the case of this power pack you've got 17 gallons of hydraulic fluid inside of a big metal box that can radiate that heat off and separates any of those concerns from your machines so this is a really nice add-on for this piece it completes it quite well obviously it's added expense but I really think these are cool there's a lot of neat applications I think you can come up with if you're a tinkerer and a guy likes to work on equipment for this power pack the business end of this is going to look much like a traditional rotary cutter so we've got big blade bolts here on the other side with some traditional rotary cutter blades you can see here these are reversible if you dulled these things out hit some rocks and stuff with them you can simply take these blades and flip them so you have another cutting surface available another cool thing with these as well is that these blades actually can stick out beyond the end of the mower here so if you pull this thing the whole way out and you look straight down you'll notice that the tips of the blades actually extend beyond the mower that'll allow you to go up to small trees and those kinds of things and use those blades to kind of hack through them so this big safety shield up here on the front is going to keep that covered up during normal operations so you'll see these are spring-loaded here as you push up against something this can go back and you'll able to push say a small tree or something into this gap right here with this blades gonna be able to come around and cut it so you see the very obvious pros to this right a unique mower that you can mow some tricky areas with that you just couldn't get a lot of other your mowing attachments into that's very cool obviously there's some cons to this so we talked through the hydraulic plumbing of this being little complex the powerpack helps with that a lot but that is an optional piece you can save well $1500 or more by plumbing one of these things in an alternative way just be very cautious with what you're doing and of course there is the safety aspect to this attaching this on to the loader will allow you to put this thing into a lot of places that you should not be operating it just very frankly right spinning blades like that can throw all kinds of debris and all kinds of material in all kinds of directions and say picking this thing up in the air and curling it back towards yourself while it's running is obviously a very bad idea and there is nothing to prevent you from doing that so it's definitely a piece that I would not give to a novice operator I would really probably not let my kids run it or anything like that definitely something you want to stay away from we use mowers like this one skid steers and that kind of stuff as well generally bigger right bigger decks bigger hydraulic motors but when they do up on a skid steer they attach a chain to the backside of the mower that you attach on your skid loader to keep you from lifting that thing too high up in the air so that little piece of safety equipment is not on any of these mowers that I've seen at this point it would be very easy to put one on yourself just grab a short length of chain and go through one of the open holes in the back of the skid steer quick attach and maybe chain that onto the front of your grill guard and that will just keep somebody from taking this thing and lifting it way up in the air where it really shouldn't be so obviously a lot of with great power comes great responsibility right and this is absolutely one of those implements that you put in that category you've really just got to be careful with what you're doing with it plumbing the hydraulics for this mower has to be done with a certain amount of care you think about what happens when one of these things is running you bring this thing up to speed you got this big blade spinning out here and that thing is going it needs to be able to return the oil out of that motor in all circumstances so in order to feed the oil into this thing it can come from any number of places you can run the feed off of a third function or rear remote or the power pack that we have here on the back but the return it needs to go into a place where it can go back to what's called sump basically run back into the tractor or into the power pack so you cannot take both of these hoses and them straight into a real remote or third function where you'll do damage when we're pricing these things out for if you check the links down here at the bottom of the video you'll find three different links one's gonna go to the mower one to the powerpack itself and then once we'll completing kit that completing kits going to give you the oil and the hoses and everything that you need in order to make this whole setup work between the tractor and the power pack but if you're gonna take it to your third function to return the sump there's some custom hydraulic work that you're gonna need to do in order to figure out how to do that return so something that our shop can talk you through on some common Kubota equipment that we know well but if you have a different piece of equipment hooking these up can come with a certain set of challenges so one thing you want to be conscious of when you're using this is not push to get too hard down onto the ground it doesn't float real well like I said before so generally when I'm running this I'm kinda hovering the thing off the ground a little bit the arm there will allow it to pick up you have it in the fixed position it won't move like that but generally it's just going to work a little bit better if you are kind of floating it with your load it is quiet I'll give you that between me like having turned off flip it on and once it spins up I can't even tell it's running so that's pretty cool you just you don't have driveline chat or any of that kind of stuff at all put this all set position I can see what I'm doing which is pretty neat too go is straight out for the machine I wouldn't have as good of a meet on the mower is what I do off the side so that's cool one thing I did earlier that I did not care for so much it doesn't do a great job of putting really close to the ground so I came out here and tried to move this grassy area before we filmed and once I set the thing on the ground and wanted to drive it forward it digs in it doesn't contour skim across the ground real well so going in Reverse seemed to fix that it kind of defeats the purpose but if you wanted to Molech right down against the ground you can set the thing down and back up with it and it drags back a lot better than it pushes forward you look back over here this is kind of neat right there's some junk in the bottom here that I wouldn't normally be able to drive over top but I can easily use the loader to lift the mower up and then set it down the top of the area that I want to mow so if you want to clean up around down trees and that kind of thing an easy way to get in there so I'm gonna cut down the road here this is the driveway coming up into our Elizabethtown store I'm gonna pull that pin out and push this down so that this thing will go down below center a little bit and we'll see how I can reach over this roadside as I Drive down the side so you can see here a little bit of what I was saying it said in this offset position I don't they at contour super well so when you go over center and you set this thing down a little bit it pivots there so it can hinge but once you hinge if I drive forward I'm twisting that entire thing against the loader and it just doesn't work well so you can't really think of that end mower deck position is as hinging there at the deck you know it's an offset and this position is really the one that you need to be using it in let's see here would be my little frustration with that in there it's contouring a little bit if I could set that front corner and it does ride up and down a little bit I can seems it if I take the mower and I roll it back a little bit keep my front edge enough I can contour a little bit but that's that position you want to watch because I am throwing some debris out in front of it because I've got the front face of the mower open though another thing that you want to watch here from the safety perspective is when you have this thing turned on and you're gonna bring it up the speed you can camera guys here in a safe place trust me bring this thing up to speed and then reach back and I'm gonna turn it off now you're gonna notice if your nurse showed those blades keeps going and going and going and that's why again we were saying the oil needs to go back to sump and not be dead ended by a valve there's a lot of inertia there and it takes a while for these things to stop so back here I just came to a rock and I wanted to pop my mower off and reposition and turn it back on again and you just got to remember when you flip this off it takes a while for all that spinning mass to come to a stop so I wasn't going down the road here my bank is coming up really steep you know I was I was cutting down before now we're gonna go up and we're going to go into the 90 degree position and see if we can push this back a little bit this would be a tricky mo right this is not something you can ever do with regular rotary cutter as I bottomed the thing out or hit stuff the it's not like a regular rotary cutter being that it's hydraulic drive so it very naturally slows down and picks right back up again as you they'll come into obstruction that stuff it doesn't bang around and throw the slip clutch or knocking sheriff pin out or any of those kind of stuff so the the the debris side of this a kind of handling that rough there we go just like I was saying handling that rough stuff is really natural it just starts right back up again so you take the mower and put it up into a 90 degree position we're gonna come back up here again with the loader rolled down and pull out the pin from this little black bar and then this bar is gonna come up and hold the mower at 90 degrees so I can cut back this nearly vertical bank so that was all pretty easy grassy stuff that push bar and blade on the front we should be able to knock down some pretty substantial things so let's simply chop some stuff down oh yeah another tricky spot for cleaning out things of the mower and stuff like this so you got basically a wall of briars right not super thick not super heavy like that 3-inch tree over there that we cut off but great demo for the kind of tricky things that the more like this is really good for so that's a little bit on the Trailblazer by tightened implement couple intricacies to talk through with the mower in its relationship to other companies firstly when we talk tighten the implement you need to keep in your mind that there are two companies in our industry tighten implement who manufactures equipment in Tennessee and tighten attachments whose import stuff from China into a no-name where a house two very different companies this is a domestically made in the u.s. product by a good group of guys down there who we get a lot of really well-priced implements from good group of guys I also have a relationship though with another company that looks exactly the same as this and that's Lane shark Lake shark seems to be the guy that came to market first with this concept who knows what happened between him and Titan but we're ending up with two strikingly similar looking products we chose to go with Titan because it is kind of say the Gen 2 product it has this guard in the front to keep those blades covered when you're pushing into things the blade bolts between the blades and the mower shaft is a real blade bolt like you'd have on a rotary cutter it's not a nut and bolt like the landshark guy uses and titan also has this power pack available to us that's not available through that other companies so we do have a relationship with both guys we are able to sell both products at this point but it for us as a dealership this is the one that fits into the product line for us a little bit better and it's a relationship with a company that we've already had so if you're looking for a piece like this and we can help you more than happy to fix your tractor up with one and you give us a call at Messick's at eight hundred to two two three three seven three or online and message calm [Music] you

Channel: Messick's Equipment

Views: 166,675

Rating: 4.8404183 out of 5

Keywords: Messicks, Kubota, new, holland, caseih, case, krone, farm, equipment, tractor, tractors, farming, farminglife, construction, laneshark, lane, shark

Id: -XuHihZKXxE

Length: 20min 4sec (1204 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 15 2019