Yesterday I decided to start off with some trim mowing on a berm that has some pine trees in it. I had the deck height set to 3" and during the cut I accidentally hit a mound of dirt and bent my new high lift blade. I still had a lot of mowing to do so I put the original 2-1 blade on so that I could finish the berm and the rest of my front yard. 20,000 steps later and I am done. At this point I estimate that I have about 5 hours on the HRS so I decided to do the first oil change. Before that, I will point out some observations. The 2-1 blade is noticeably quieter than the high lift blade as to be expected, and while reducing the blade's lift there was also noticeably less discharge velocity and more clippings packed to the underside of the deck. I normally wouldn't use the 2-1 blade for the type of mowing that I was doing, but I needed to finish and it was the only working blade that I had. Now on to the oil change. I am a bit OCD when it comes to equipment maintenance. With the machine still warm I drained out the original 10w30 oil that was supplied with the mower. I have seen many complaints about the oil coming out of Honda mowers having a very lustrous appearance and I can tell you from my experience with 3 Honda mowers and a Honda single stage snowblower, they have all done this on the first oil change. These are all aluminum engines and it is to be expected that very small aluminum particles will make their way into the oil on the first change or two. Anyway, a couple days ago I picked up a quart of Honda SAE30 oil from my local dealer. I always do a flush of the engine when changing the oil. Since the GCV160 takes only about 16oz of oil in a change, why not use whole quart and do a flush and change at the same time? During the warm up with the flush oil, I decided to check and adjust the engine RPM. I had set the RPM at ~3,250 out of the box in an effort to get the BTS as close to 19,000 while still being within the operating range of the engine. I decided after I bent the blade on the mower that I was going to try out the double blade Quadracut setup so I adjusted the RPM down to ~3,000-3,150 since these engines lose torque as they gain horsepower and the double blade setup will not only be heavier but will be making 4 cuts at once instead of two. I also took this time to adjust the Smart Drive controls again. I adjusted them the first time from memory (as I recalled from doing on my HRX) and I realized on the second adjustment that I had not positioned the handle correctly. The manual also offers two different ways to adjust the drive controls so I opted for adjusting to complete lockup and then backing up the adjuster 8 complete revolutions. From what I can tell, this has resolved my issue with the clunking sound that I was hearing before. After that I drained the flush oil and topped the engine off with the remainder of the quart of SAE30, checked and brushed off the air cleaner, and put the mower away for the night.
This afternoon I set out to cut just my back yard with the new Quadracut blades on. This is the 3rd time that I have cut this area this week, but given the rain that we have had, the grass needed it. I had the deck set at 4" when doing this cut; I will note that on this mower, the cutting height is actually 1/4" lower when using the double blade setup. What I observed with the Quadracut blades is that while the discharge velocity is not quite as good as the high lift blade (and yes I know I just slowed the engine down a bit), I did notice that the clippings were noticeably smaller as stated in Honda's marketing information. I did also notice that the added weight of the blades and possibly the extra work needed by the engine to turn them did force me to slow my walking down a bit in order to process the clippings being removed from the turf. In the end this proved to be okay as the final result of the cut was more than acceptable. I only saw small amounts of visible clippings in the really heavy growth areas like where my septic drains and where the downspout from my gutter empties. I do not know for certain as to whether not not I will try the Quadracut blades with the chute closed off, but my feelings are that the mulching performance might suffer slightly as the bottom high lift blade will work against a closed off deck when they are normally meant for discharge and bag applications. One other thing to note is that the Quadracut blades have cutting edges that are directly above each other. The last two generations of the HRR mower and all generations of the HRX with the MicroMulch blades have a bottom cutting edge that is raked back from the top blade's cutting edge. I have never been able to confirm whether or not HRX blades will actually fit or work on my mower, but it might be worth picking up a set of blades to give it a try.
Lastly, I have included some pictures of the various blades that are available for this mower. There is a picture of the blade that I bent hitting the dirt mound and also a picture of my back yard after I finished cutting it today. Please do not judge the crooked lines or the strange coloring of my lawn; this is over a rather uneven septic field.
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