4-Mower Hitch Cuts A 9-Ft. Swath

4-Mower Hitch Cuts A 9-Ft. Swath FARM HOME Lawn Mowers (31h,38) 32-3-3 "It isn't much to look at," says Don Loken of his custom-made 4-gang mower hitch, "but it sure beats driving around for five hours on a rider with just a 44-in. deck." The Wanamingo, Minn. repairman, carpenter and do-it-yourself inventor built his 9-ft. wide parade of lawn mowers using three decks that are more than 22 years old and cost about $30 apiece. He pulls it with a White 16 hp rider that he bought several years ago for $100. Loken got the idea for his mower configuration while mowing his large yard and doing a commercial job at a neighboring cemetery. "Spending five or six hours mowing lawn every week was getting really boring, and it was taking a lot of gas. I knew my old White rider with the twin 16 Briggs had plenty of power, so I just figured out a way to hook the trailing mowers all together behind it." He started by attaching a 3-ft. long piece of 2-in. channel iron to the back of his rider to pull the mowers. Hitching the front mower to this bar aligned the trailing mowers to mow on the left side of his rider. On each push mower he removed the handles and controls and fashioned a triangle hitch for the front. Each hitch moves up and down so the mower easily follows the lay of the lawn, but doesn't swivel, so the trailing mowers stay in line. The two mowers at the back hitch onto a 3-ft. piece of angle iron bolted onto the left side of the mower deck directly in front of them. They also have wheel guards so they slide around rocks and tree stumps. "Once I got the offset figured out and made the rigid hitch on each deck, the mowers trailed in a nice straight line without a problem," says Loken. However, pulling the three mowers way off to the left, the riding mower wanted to drift and slip as he was turning corners and going up and over ditch banks. Loken's solution was to put duals on the back wheels of the rider, fill them with fluid and add a 10-in. solid concrete block to the front of the tractor for ballast. Now he speeds along at 3 to 4 mph over any terrain. "Each of the trailing mowers has a 5 hp motor, two of which I replaced in the past couple years, so there's plenty of power to mow my regular lawn and the ditches on my quarter mile driveway. Now I can mow more ground in an hour than I could with the rider alone in three hours," notes Loken. Contact FARM SHOW Followup, Don Loken, County 30 Boulevard, Wanamingo, Minnesota 55983 (507 824-3308).

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