I’ve bought this second hand lawn tractor to convert into a sort of “wood tractor” to use at Century Wood. At the weekend, I took the tractor to the wood to try it out in its stock configuration, before making any mods to it, and made the YouTube video at the end of this post.
The tractor was built in 2004 at the Electrolux factory in South Carolina. At the time they had the contract to make tractors under Sears’ “Craftsman” brand, and the same place now makes Husqvarna lawn tractors.
The first thing is that it doesn’t have the removable mower deck on the bottom which did the actual mowing. It had rusted away and that helped push the price of the tractor down on eBay.
It has these wide shallow-treaded “turf saver” tyres which don’t chew up your nice lawn while you’re mowing. I’m thinking about replacing them with ag tyres that have a much deeper chevron pattern and work in the mud. You can see in the video at the end of this post how the current tyres do.
Between them is this hitch, which is a just a horizontal plate attached to the chassis with a hole in it. It’s there for pulling carts around gardens. But they’re not very strong as you can imagine and I’m planning to put a much more substantial hitch on there, since the main job of the tractor will be pulling trolley loads of wood around.
There are two bulbs on the front, powered by a dedicated 5A winding in the alternator. I plan to replace them with LEDs packaged as bulbs which draw a lot less current, and that will allow me to power 12V accessories.
I took the tractor to the wood and back with the same Maypole 1.5m trailer I used for the scythe mower in my last post.
Here is the video. It has more details about the mods I’m planning, and good look underneath using a jack. Then there’s a drive around the woodland rides. My next video about the “wood tractor” will show the first set of upgrades.
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