Riding Mowers With Manual Transmissions

[TheOldGoat]

Does anyone know if any company still manufactures a Riding Mower (Lawn Tractor) with a good old fashion 6 or 7 Speed Manual Transmission, I use to own a Pouland Pro with a 6 Speed Tranny with Clutch, and they are still showing 2 on there Web Site, but no one seems to sell them.

 

[SeniorCitizen]

Possibly the closest we could get is one with the variable 7 speed shift like MTD made and it seems like maybe Troybuilt adopted that system or maybe MTD built Troybuilt . Or i have a barn find Murray from back in the 80's that two 20's will buy .

 

[SeniorCitizen]

We can understand why they're probably not available . That would be about like a car dealer salesman attempting to sell my wife a 3 on the tree or a 4 on the floor .

 

[7394]

Yea, but they were so basic & simple to keep going..

My last craftsman had a Dana 6 speed in it, piece of crap, made in china., (Dana name I knew from the 4x4 world) but didn't know the siold the use of it to china., Started leaking out the axle seals just before the lousy warranty ended. Sears said that unit was discontinued..(1 year old) I filed suit w/ BBB against Sears. Judge agreed w/me & got them to
allow me to look thru the parts online. And find what I needed.

I opted for a Peerless 6 speed, just had to change some brackets to adapt it, all paid for (except my labor) by Sears. I got the unit running fine & dandy, & then sold it, & won't do anything w/sears anymore,..

 

[bertsmobile1]

Does anyone know if any company still manufactures a Riding Mower (Lawn Tractor) with a good old fashion 6 or 7 Speed Manual Transmission, I use to own a Pouland Pro with a 6 Speed Tranny with Clutch, and they are still showing 2 on there Web Site, but no one seems to sell them.

It is all about ticket price and lazyness
Manual transmissions are a lot lot more expensive to make than hydros
Even if the gears are all powder pressings the cost is still at least twice that of making a pair of valve plates and a cylinder block with some pistons or ball bearings in them .
Next a mower gearbox is really just a set of 4,5 or 6 different drive ratios and to get speed variations in any one of those ratios you have to introduce clutch slip or vary engine speed which of course you should not do because the blades are designed to run within a specific range or speeds
So the mower will cost more & run at a fixed single speed which is not an easy sell .

Because of greed & brainwashing we seem to think everything should be cheap when we need to buy it and get cheaper every year because of "technical advances " .
However the only actual technical advance is to fully robotically manufacture the mowers and that requires new factories and a lot of investment that no USA (and absolutely no Aust ) company will do even if they could get the finance ( they won't ) because the profit in any individual quarter will be higher by buying trash from the 3rd world & selling it to you at a massive mark up .

If you get a chance go to Brazil & do a tour of the VW factory
Now Brazil is still considered a 3rd world country & there are quite a few US businesses with plants there because the labour is 1/6 of USA rates and there are virtually no pollution laws
The VW factory has no people in there, all robots working in an airconditioned factory inside an outer building .
\That is technical advances being applied to manufacturing
Then go to any USA car plant that does factory tours , not much has changed since WWII . the machines are newer & work faster but still lots of people getting in each others way in a factory that is 3 times bigger than it would have been if the vehicles are fully machine assembled .