138 Before You Buy A Dr Power Implement, Watch!!!

[@gregoryhumphries8956]

The Best Machine is the one with LOCAL DEALER. Another thing is KZbin. I have purchased many things by just seeing them on KZbin. If I was to buy a Dr. mower it would come from local Dealer.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

I agree! When I checked on Dr Power website the closest dealer was 70 miles away. Later I found two ten minutes away. My rule of thumb is: If possible buy from the closest source. From what I am hearing, things are not better at Dr. Power. If someone else has a different experience, please comment. Even my neighbor won't buy from them. This mower should have been a protype, not a finished product. $25 in manufacturing cost would have made this a type of the line mower. Thanks for the comment. Five stars for you!

[@Hilltopsounds-ve1mq]

Thank you.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

Your Welcome. Be safe.

[@n5uge12]

I bought one and had many of the same problems. I eventually got rid of it. It was one problem after another.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

It's a shame. It wouldn't take much to make a DR the one to buy. I am thinking that there is a name change coming to DR Power. Be safe.

[@rox6385]

Feel the pain...have promax 52T, bought 2 yrs ago...concur, wires exposed get torn out easily, includes battery cables, snapped my battery wires constantly on undergrowth of trees. Also, ripped my gas line off and tore bottom fuel clamp off of gas tank. Real pain, have to be careful under trees or else will tear off the wires/fuel line. Luckily I did purchase extended warranty and they replaced fuel tank and my ground wire from battery that broke in two places at no cost to me. Just had down time of a week awaiting parts, kinda goons up mowing. Recently had front right weld on lift arm area of deck where it goes up and down develop a large open crack, I decided to get it fixed on my own as otherwise would have to wait for entire new deck, got it welded at local shop on both sides with rebar on top....built better than a tank now and feel it won't open up again on welding area. Cost me $100.00 but worth it, as otherwise would have had to take it in to local repair shop about 50 miles away and wait for return. Basically I agree, well built machine but does have some design flaws that need fixing by them...the wires/fuel lines are too exposed for what it is intended for, I put plastic corrugated wrapping around them and works better, but really needs metal tubing....the weld that opened up may have just been a bad weld...still, shouldn't have happened...works well cutting through all tall grass, weeds and small 1 to 3" saplings, bushes and small trees as they stated though, so am pleased with it overall. Haven't had issues since I've rewelded areas and used the plastic wrapping....nowadays, not sure anything is foolproof.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

Other than those things, you're saying it's a good machine? Seriously, I don't understand companies that have a brand that should be protected with its reputation. If a line has more than a 3% returns or complaints, they should figure what is wrong and fix it and then let their customers know there is a fix that if need be can be fixed now, or if it can wait, fixed during winter time. I think there should be a shield protecting the top of the deck. It could be made out of metal or thick plastic. As for bad welds, there are ways to check. My dad would hit the weld with a sledge hammer, but there are more gentle ways. How many sales have been lost because of this video? One soundly based video that bashes a product can shut a line down. Let us know if you got your problem fixed. As for a tank, that may be something that could be converted into a brush mower. It just might work. Be safe.

[@rox6385]

Roger all Sir, can't argue with a thing you stated. I bought a backup John Deere Frontier RC 2048 rotor cutter just in case I need a more reliable backup next time I might have an issue. Water under the bridge on the DR though, bought it, done deal now have to live with it. Will just be careful cutting under those trees! Ha....enjoy your videos! Take care....Rox

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

@@rox6385 Thank for the update and kind words. It does look good for Dr Power.

[@OldIronAcres]

Great Video! @Old Farmer - - I was really considering one of these... then I just took my zTurn out and ran it through some really tall and rough brush. I'll probably have to patch a tire or two next week! LOL Thanks for the comments on the DR Bush hog. I'm going to have to think some more if this is the right tool for our property. Biggest positive I can see is the offset, and low profile to get under the trees. You bring up some awesome points!!!

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

Some of the other brush mowers have an offset tongue. As I have said before, to me, I think they stopped at the prototype and didn't finish the needed details before putting out for sale. It sounds like you may have limbs and bushes. Maybe making a shroud will cure the problems. Be safe.

[@richardwyrozub4126]

@@Original_Old_Farmer 16:31

[@douglasengle2704]

My experience with the original DR brush mower in 1992 was bad, but there was nothing else that could be taken apart and taken to work on a trail. Although it is a real thrill to get behind and have that mower cut some brush a lot of the thrill was because it was such a crude machine and the impression that it is tough. It would only go about 10 - 15 minutes before throwing the blade belt and each time the belt came off it was damage more making it come off more frequent. It turned out DR was only using a single fractional horsepower belt for a 10 hp mower and they were doing a right angle drive where the belt had to go from vertical to a horizontal pully. That arrangement would work with a flat belt of old tractors with a long distance between the pullies, but a V-belt puts most of the angle change between the pullies right at the departure point of the sheave. This is incredibly destructive to the V-belt. The right angle drive also doesn't allow higher horsepower belts of the same dimensions I found out because the server angle change stretches the reinforcing cords contrary to their design loadings. I strongly got the idea the DR machines were incomplete and fragile. The components were made to look crude and tough, but they were likely just not engineered and recycling an old idea. The metal seemed of the lowest grade and lacked strength and durability. I would think that original brush mower would have been very impressive for the owner to try out on some tall grass, but the reality is a modern zero turn mower at full hight would cut the same grass just as well, with a lot more speed and comfort. If they were to use it for a couple hours on vines, downed branches, with saplings and such they'd probably find after a couple hours of impressive work it would start throw the blade drive belt because the stress had destroyed the cords in it. I also had problems with the chain drive used to propel the mower. The metal structures would bend so much with the gear box mount that the chain would come off the sprocket. What appeared to be happening is that after 7 - 10 hours of hard use the drive chain had stretched and the cog teeth were showing heavy wear and bending so the flexing of the gear box mount was now too much for the compromised chain and sprocket to except. I could buy a better chain and probably a better sprocket and another brace on the gearbox would likely fix the bending, but if I was going to do all that I though I should likely start figuring out the types of forces the system was experiencing. In effect I should engineer it. I'm buying this machine so that heavy amount of design work should have already been done. This original brush mower had no reverse and was over 100 pounds so you'd have to pull back with considerable force to back it up. Then there was the matter that it would only cut 4" high, but because the blade deck was on skids that would ride a good inch or so above the terrain the actual cut hight could be near 5". This was too high to want to walk on. When I redesigned the deck a bit I dropped the blade 2". That worked a lot more to my liking. The actual cut hight was closer 3". It takes a lot more power to cut that much shorter and the engine started to behave much more like a typical walk behind mower when it hits tall grass and bogs down. I heavily modified one of these mowers to have a dual belt drive to the blade and larger sheave diameters with longer distance between the them. The longer distance between the drive wheels/engine platform and the cutting deck was actually useful for razing the cutter deck above brush and bring it down on it to mulch. When I'd raze the mower deck by leaning the mower back I discovered B&S engine wouldn't put up with the fairy mild amount of angle it was place under causing it to flounder. This was a vertical cylinder B&S and I think it was likely intended for stationary work. Bad design choice for a mower that is expected to be going through drainage ditches! When I actually did put the mower on tough brush with a double belt system able to transfer the engine's horsepower the engine could be dragged down to a stall fairly easily. It had been promoted of very ample power. Once the belt didn't come off under heavy load it turned out the engine was at about the power level of an average walk behind mower just sized for a 26" blade. So the DR was very impressive initially, started to show blade drive belt issues in under 10 hours and all the components under heavy use started to give out between 20 - 30 hours use. Now it was an incredible machine when it worked except for the unexpectedly high cut. My guess is these mower were purchased by people that really didn't run them that much. In 2 - 3 hours you could cover maybe 2/3 of an acre of heavily over grown grass with some small samplings on relatively flat ground. That would be very impressive to most new owners and then their major job may have been done and it might just be used to refresh the cut a few times a year. From my work with the original DR brush mower I really liked the idea of hydraulic motors for driving the cutter blades and propelling the mower. Belts over heat and all the dust and grime of brush cutting is a very poor environment for them. Hydraulic motors on the other hand are totally sealed. The transmission is is the hydraulic lines meaning there is no torque wind up that needs to be resisted as in driver shaft and belt driver systems. The hydraulic oil can be run through radiators to keep things at reasonable temperatures and they can take tremendous amounts of shock if the hydraulic system is designed to accommodate sudden stoppages. I would think you could be into the thousands of hours on a hydraulic system before wear is a serious issue. With V-belts tens of hours before the belts are showing wear issues I think is common and that's for Good V-belt systems. DR I'm convinced doesn't have a good V-belt drive engineer or roller chain driver engineer. Some kind of cartoonist sketch artist by be their design department and then off to the fabricators.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

Impressive undertstanding of mechanics. You took the time to find the problems and fixed it. Good job. Be safe.

[@douglasengle2704]

@@Original_Old_Farmer That brush mower was actually too much to put right. The use I had for the mower largely disappeared and I'd proven my design, but the mower was really insufficient for doing the type of work I thought is would have been made for. The theory I put together for designing a quarter turn drive was to calculate the belt's top and bottom edges of the belt distances around the path of the sheaves modeling the angle the belt would take with the sheave as a simple angle without radius to make the calculations simpler. When these distance are exactly the same the belt should be self aligning. It seems counter intuitive, but V-belts and flat belts seek the higher tension so they climb towards the larger diameter or the tighter side edge of the belt. You change the side-to-side tension in the belt by making one edge travel farther making it have more tension than the other side. That is not the way most things work. Most things seek the looser tension. The other aspect is the structure of the V-belt drive flexes and pulls inward causing the sheaves to change angle and therefore changes the distances the edges of the belt travel through. Do you want to set the pully alignment to be optimum at high tress or at average stress? Well the belts rarely common off at average stress so I would bias the design toward angling the pullies for when they have high stress. The way to change the side-to-side tension of the belts was by rotating the engine around its vertical axle. So what was the distance change between a well tension side-to-side V-belt and one that would fight staying on the sheave?. I think the distance was 1/64 of inch. The difference in the belt edge's distance really needed to be zero. This took the better part of a 1/2 year to theorize. There was no material on quarter turn belt drives I could find. I had to revert to starting from scratch. I had to buy a small welding outfit. Something I'd been wanting to have anyway. It was awfully cool to watch those dual belts guide themselves through that quarter turn drive system I'd designed! I'd never design a system using a quarter turn drive other than possibly for something to look cool in certain way. A well engineered V-belt drive should run thousands of hours before belt replacement is needed. Lawnmower designs never do that. I never got around to fabricating a cover/belt retainer for the front sheave connected to the blade deck. This meant I couldn't put the blade belt into neutral because the mower did that by loosing the belt, so I started with the blade engaged. That was fine for testing, but not for a truly functional mower. Then it turned out that cutting at 3" height instead of 5" height took a lot more power than engine could provide I'd had enough. Putting more power in the belt drive system might fully overload a design that was already 1/4 the design power ability it should have. With two V-belts and larger diameter sheaves the V-belt blade drive was probably officially rated to at least 2 horsepower. Because it still used a quarter turn drive only the cord structure of the fractional horsepower belts could be used. The higher reinforced cord structure of higher horsepower belts doesn't take to be twisted a quarter turn. Lawnmower applications typically over load V-belts by a few multiples so the belt life goes to tens of hours instead of thousands of hours. I junked the brush mower. I did save the large double belt sheave of the cutting blade shaft for using as a survey chain holder and still have to this day.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

@@douglasengle2704 I've done my share of cobbling things together but you put me to shame. Back on the I used help keep the old combines running with my dad. Sometimes we'd have to fashion a part or two. But it sounds like you could open a machinist shop and actually make a good living at it. Impressive.

[@douglasengle2704]

​@@Original_Old_Farmer I thought I should be able to figure out a lawnmower. I'm an electrical engineer and had to take mechanical engineering classes as part of that where about 2/3 of the people failed their first time through including me, so I thought I should be able to figure out something as relatively simple as a lawnmower. It turned out what was happening with the quarter turn belt drive was not simple and was counter intuitive. I was unsuccessful in getting advise on it from V-belt over the counter suppliers who looked at lawnmower V-belt designs as v-belt abuse of the first order and a quarter turn V-belt drive as perverted and something to eliminate. You wouldn't want to bring up the subject of a V-belt quarter turn drive in the polite company of V-belt advocates . There is a theory I developed to arrange the pulley geometry angles to exactly have both edges of the belt trace the same distances disregarding the drive pulley's apparent visual alignment with the driven pulley. This worked out in my practice with this mower to have the engine pulley aimed, if I recall correctly, between the driven pulley's vertical shaft and the far edge of the slack side of the driven pulley. This places a painfully sharp looking angle on the V-belt as it is pulled into the engine's drive pulley, but to my surprise the belts, now a dual belt design, wanted to stay on the sheaves! Woo Haw! Under heavy stress the angle of the pulleys changed and I was thinking I should set the pulley angles to be at their most optimum when under heavy strain. Then I decided I was still a few hurdles away from getting a practical machine and the trail use I had needed it for had largely changed making the brush mower less of a game changer and maybe not the most practical solution even if was working as I'd like. I'd fixed and modified a couple of lawnboy professional walk behind mowers donated to me. I'd have a month between group trail work sessions to prepare equipment and I think we'd run those mowers and it was common for one of them to break during the process and I'd spend the next month rebuilding them. They were small and light and I don't think I was having to buy that many parts for them, but I don't think there was part of those lawnboys I hadn't had in my hands sometimes many times. Being 2-cycle with no oil made them easy to take apart frequently even in the field and they could be carried at any angle in a car. Their carbs also never had a major issue with what angle they were cutting at. This was a railroad and tracks being maintained for trail use and getting grants for a rail-trail bike path 1990-4. I invented the term rail-trail for the Capital Crescent Trail in Montgomery Co MD and Washington D.C. to mean a trail that precisely follows the well maintained rail alignment. Our clearing of the over grown areas was to present that image. The term rail-trail was picked up from my use here by the Rails-to-Trails conservancy and pushed out all over the world. So getting a viable brush mower was inline with that vision and I thought I should be able to crack it and I largely did, but my advise is to research achieving these implementation using hydraulic motors and pumps. You should be able to come up with long term systems to deal with shock and drive line abuse by implementing them in hydraulics using light weight materials. I haven't researched hydraulics, but an over view of them leads me to believe a lot of the really nearly impossible issues with shock and drive line abuse can be greatly addressed once transmission and drive is done with hydraulics. Hope this background is beneficial in some way.

[@oilyemperor]

Thank you for this video. I will be looking into other options now. Very helpful.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

From those of us who have such equipment, I think I can say for all of us, "A wise decision." Be safe.

[@jeremystrickland919]

Well I was looking for bush hog for my atv. Looked at this one and swisher.

[@jerrybriggs3233]

I had the same problem with a DR tiller . The one that was delivered was used and beat to crap . I sent it back .

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

Their reputation is getting to be less that optimal. I don't think Generac buying has helped their reputation. Thanks for the input.

[@robertlee6781]

I have 52T. I think the T stands for terrible. Every year I have had major problems with mine. I am going to get a regular zero turn and go with it. My field is where I want it and I can just mow it to maintain it. The DR has been one headache after another.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

Generac now owns Dr Power. It may be they will stop using this name and continue on with either the Generac name or some other. They cannot continue to successfully sell products under the Dr name. They are getting hammered on the Internet for poor quality products. Whereas, Generac make excellent generators, but the office has a bad attitude to the point that if I have to buy another whole house generator, it will be Honda. I DO feel your pain. Be safe.

[@robertseniorboyd6535]

thamks i was looking put not know

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

You're very welcome. I hope you find one that works and fits your needs. Be safe.

[@krama2940]

Sounds like they suck. Was considering getting one of their brush cutters.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

If you are only going to mow field grass and if you figure a way to tie the remote to your tractor or mower, you can get by. But if there is brush, it will only be a fight to keep things running because the brush will pull out wires. I wouldn't recommend one. Be safe.

[@bobbydavis3723]

Lord just bought one

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

I hope you don't have the same problems. From what I can tell, it's worse since Generac bought the company. That's only scuttlebutt. Let all of us know your experience. Be safe.

[@kali4740]

How has it worked out?

[@albrownmd]

What is the maximal offset of center from the hitch?

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

I used a tape measure, since I have the mower tucked away until the mowing my tape measure said 32 inches.

[@albrownmd]

@@Original_Old_Farmer is that 32 inches from the center of hitch to the center of the mower or is the 32 inches from the center hitch to outside cutting edge of the mower? Thank you for your response.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

@@albrownmd I measured the offset of the tongue from the center. So it would offset the mower 32 inches. Since I have a Farmall 'A' I can also hitch another 12 inches from the center of the tractor. If you are not using a tractor I think the offset was designed so that most AVTs or such would not have to run over the brush. If you are still looking to buy, make sure that the mower has ample shielding to protect mower components such as wiring, battery, and gas line. This is the major design flaw with the DR. As for the height adjustment, I just don't know. I could have a lemon or it's a bad design.

[@albrownmd]

@@Original_Old_Farmer i have a ventrac with a 6 foot brush hog on the front. It can tow a pull behind mower while i cut with the brush hog in front but i want to see how much offset i can get more mowing swath per pass. 10 feet would be ideal. I plan on looking at the 54 inch DR field mower.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

@@albrownmd Sounds impressive. Would a sickle bar be appropriate for what you are doing?

[@micon9460]

Seems like all your problems are user error. You really said that you couldn't tell if the blades were engaged because the noise level of your tractor?!?! That has nothing to do with the DR. Are you a city slicker?

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

Even when I turned off the tractor it was hard to tell if the blades were engaged because of the noise from the motor on the mower. There are flaws in the machine and I consider what is being sold is a prototype design without the finishiing touches such as a deck shield and a tally light on the remote start. It would be impossible to tell anything if I had been wearing noise cancelling headphones. That being said, please be safe.

[@jerrybriggs3233]

Amen 🙏

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

So true. Be safe

[@matthewvanderbeek2847]

Do any of the brands have extra shields? Probably not. Probably not meant to go under tree branches.

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

There are some mowers that are better protected, but a fulll shield, no. Good question. Be safe.

[@scott5609]

Dr sucks

[@Original_Old_Farmer]

You pretty much said it all. Be safe.