Three Things That are Pure "Sales Hype" About Rotary Cutters

I can tell what people are doing right now because of the questions that are coming in. I've had a bunch of folks want to know more about rotary cutters in the last couple of weeks and it seems like every time I do a video on these machines it gets a lot of views. So, I'm going to cover a bunch of the recent questions in the next three videos.

If you're out shopping for a brush hog and you've never been around one, there are lots of terms that may confuse you. You have a sales person sitting across the desk from you telling you that his machine is better because one specification beats everyone else's, you may not know what to believe. In this video I give you three selling features on rotary cutters, that in my humble opinion, are nothing more than sales hype.

The first is gearbox horsepower and, with that, the size of the gearbox. Gearboxes are rated by the maximum horsepower they'll handle, and if a salesperson is trying to tell you his machine is superior because it has 90 hp gearboxes and that's vastly superior to a competitor's with 65 hp gearboxes, I'd argue. If you have a 30 hp tractor it's really a moot point, in fact, do you really need a heavier gearbox for a small tractor? I'd take that out of the equation.

The next claim about rotary cutters is that mine is better because it has a longer gearbox warranty. I used to hate it when manufacturers put extremely long warranties on one part of a piece of equipment. As a customer, you tend to hear the longest warranty period the salesperson tells you, and they tend not to reveal during the sales process that while the warranty on the gearbox is six years, the rest of the machine has a one-year warranty. That's the way it usually is. My opinion is that if there's going to be a manufacturer-defect warranty issue, it'll show up in the first year. If that gearbox survives one whole season of cutting, especially when you're knocking down land that hasn't been cleared in a while, it's likely to make it for a long time...WITH PROPER CARE. Most of the time, when a gearbox fails it's because the operator didn't check the oil (or had a lot of water in there), hit something that didn't move, or ran into something in the field that wrapped up around the desk and took the seal out of the bottom of the gearbox and it ran without lubrication until it blew up. None of those scenarios would be covered under warranty. I'd be real surprised if a manufacturer who put a six year warranty on a gearbox wouldn't find a way around replacing one in the last year. If it lasted that long was it really a manufacturing defect?

Finally, the last sales feature that I think is overrated is blade tip speed. Faster blade tip speeds generally mean a cleaner cut, but do you really want that? I'm brush hogging woody plants like buck brush, locust trees and briars and don't want them cut off clean. A rough cut might mean slow, or no, regrowth and that undesireable plant goes away. So I'd avoid paying any attention to blade tip speed unless I wanted a really nice looking cut, and then it might be time to consider a finish mower.

Some may argue with me, but those are three things I wouldn't pay any attention to if I were buying a rotary cutter. In my next video we'll look at five things I would definitely be looking at to compare different machines when buying. A final video will look at options to get, and those to avoid when buying a cutter.

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Видео Three Things That are Pure "Sales Hype" About Rotary Cutters канала Tractor Mike