Yesterday morning I was cutting grass with one of my Scag Tiger Cat mowers.
It was a very wet morning and the grass we were cutting had been cut a week to the day.
It was fairly heavy grass even though it was only a week away cut.
Anyway I smelled hot grease like a bearing getting hot. I looked down and raised the cover on the platform and the center bearing was smoking and it was the smell of a bearing overheating. Have smelled it hundreds of times because i was a maintenance mechanic in a paper mill for over 21 years. Smelled like the grease was very hot.
The mower has a little over 1000 hours on it and went out of warranty about a month ago. Just before warranty went out I had it in the dealer and they replaced all three spindles and bearings in the deck.
I took it back to the dealer yesterday. I went back yesterday afternoon and the mechanic said that he could find nothing wrong with the mower. He said that he removed the belts and checked for slack in the bearings on all three spindles and there was none. Nothing was binding or dragging or no noise when turning anything by hand. He said that he started the mower and engaged the deck and bypassed the switch and let it run for over an hour and nothing heated or smoked.
I ran that same mower 8 hours today and it ran flawless.
I have never seen this happen before.
Anybody got any thoughts on this one?
#2
Boobala
Cutting wet grass ?? ........ YOU must be made outa money !! That sure strains the equipment and sends it to an early junkyard !
I mow wet grass about everyday.My day starts at 6am long before the dew is gone. Have even mowed in the rain more than a few times. Back to original post.Maybe something was bound up and the heat n cooling cycle freed it up or it wore in.That kind of heat likely got the seal .Run it over grease it.Hope for the best.
Here in southern Indiana the grass hasn't been dry for over 6 weeks.Temps in the 90's,humidity in the 70's℅ and rain every other day.Even with sunny conditions all day,with the high humidity,the grass never dries out.Could not imagine what the grass would look like if I waited for it to dry.(6 weeks so far and still waiting).Sometimes you have no choice..
#6
John R
I've seen wet grass get under the pulleys, smoke and burn from the friction.
I have also, and have had a stick drag on a turning part that started to burn.
When I lube the spindles, I look at the color of the venting grease to give me an indication of the bearing conditions. I have one spindle on my Tiger Cub that takes much more grease than the other two and spews out thin black grease when lubed. May need to replace this spindle in time. Am going to do a 50 hour lube of the machine today.
This is going to be my last mowing season, getting to old for this stuff, too dry, hot and dusty for this old man to deal with. I'll continue to do my own place and my church properties. I gave up snow removal a few years back and I don't miss any of it!!!!
If we did not cut wet grass we would not have cut grass here in about 6 weeks atleast and the grass would be waist high.
We run Scag Lawn Mowers and they can take it. That particular mower is 2 years old and has over 1000 hours on it. I have another one that will be 2 years old in April and it will have more than that on it by then as well.
We have to buy goo d equipment and run the hide off of it to make a living.
#10
NorthBama
yes here in Bama if a person waits until dew dries it will be 10 am and 95 degree
Here is South Alabama (about 100 miles off the coast) it has rained more in the last 6 weeks than I honestly ever remember it raining. We have run daily getting rained on at some point every day till this last week.
#12
Homer1
I honestly never mow wet. Wear in addition to the deck build-up issues most people who mow wet face just make it more of a hassle than a plus. I can suffer through a little warm weather, that's what God made beer for.
As for this condition, if you can't duplicate it, it must have been a fluke of some sort.
Funny you were a paper mill employee, I work at a printing company, wonder if we ever ran some of it.
If I had waited for it to get dry in July of this year and most of August as well we would have grass 6' deep. We many times cut 90 or so yards every two weeks from 15 acres down. If we did not cut wet grass we would not have cut grass this summer.
I left the mills in 2000. Started in 1978. We were actually a pulp mill that produced pulp that many other mills would buy and reply and make various kinds of paper. Our hardwood pulp was considered some of the best in the world back in the day. There were two mills on site when I left that each ran over 1000 tons of bleached kraft a day. It is a good chance you might have used paper that was produced with the pulp from one of those two mills.
