New Member

tony.niemann

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Sep 11, 2014
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I am new. My passion is chess. I have a second passion on my 11 acres in Taylorsville, KY. I had about 150 trees scattered around my property including over 100 of these being in a peach orchard when I bought the property in 2002. My first act was to purchase a new 725A Grasshopper (regular gas, 61" cut, 25 horse Kohler engine). I had a bulldozer in to do about $13,000 worth of work, including renovating a shallow pond, cleaning out a hollow, correcting drainage problems, pushing over 150 year old trees in their last stages of life, lowering the driveway, cleaning out a hollow so that I could plant 2 acres of grass in the hollow and 300 trees around the entire property 10 years. About 100 of those trees that I planted were removed or died because of weather, disease, getting run over by a mower, or were not shaped right - determined by the type of tree that I put in. I removed 70% of the peach trees and other trees that were not adding to the landscape. Peach trees do not produce unless you put a lot of work into them over the years, and I was more interested in creating a scenic homestead. I put in four decorative walls around my house to improve the landscape. My wife put hundreds of flowers in of various types but this year I convinced her to get rid of five or six areas that were not close to the house and get rid of most of the flowers completely, using base plants for landscaping. It was too hard to keep the weeds out of the huge size of the plantings with all the other landscaping we are doing. We cut all 11 acres of our property. I have a Massey Ferguson tractor with a front-end loader that I welded a hook onto so that I could pull stumps out when I cut down a tree. I have a bush hog to cut around my pond. I bought a 61" (or 61") Encore Prowler several years later so that my wife and I could cut the grass in one day...five or six hours.

The Grasshopper is far superior to the Encore Prowler. The Grasshopper is a 2003 model and the Prowler may be a 2004 or 2005 model. This year I had two different belts break on the Prowler, one driving the deck belt and the other driving the pump to the wheel drive. I drive the Prowler because it does not have the cushioning that the Grasshopper seat has. My wife drives the Grasshopper. We replaced the blades on the Grasshopper this year when we had it serviced. After that, the mower started cutting out. My wife could restart it and start cutting again, but the mower would die again while she was cutting. An exact description of the EXACT symptoms of the mower is what I told her that I needed. Non-mechanics and/or non-electronic descriptions do not have the ability to provide the type of descriptions that are needed to fix some intermittent problems. My wife is not a detailed person as I am and does not have my experience with electronics and mechanics. After a couple months of asking her to describe the symptoms in painful detail she was finally successful in giving me enough information so that I could send an email to Grasshopper. I told them in great detail, finishing the saga with the fact that she told me that the last time the mower stopped it would die again as soon as she moved the handles inward. The mower would start to cut off, and if she moved them back outward the mower would keep running. I got a call from the Grasshopper factory and the guy was very complimentary about the description of my intermittent problem. He told me that the problem was either an intermittent seat switch or brake switch. He told me that I could jumper them out to find out which one was causing the problem. He said that as the handles are moved inward the ground is no longer provided by the handles but is disconnected and now is being provided by the seat switch and brake switch.

The moral of this story is that there are a lot of good mechanics and people out there who understand how various lawn mowers operate, but if you don't give them complete and accurate symptoms your chances to fix your problem are slim.
 

BlazNT

Lawn Pro
Joined
Apr 26, 2012
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Agreed. Its had to diagnose "My mowers dies every once in a while. What is wrong?"
 
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