Reel Mowers

We have a walk behind reel. We mow the fair and foul ground. It takes an hour to do both.

If you’re not afraid of using the phone and schmoozing, the answer can be fairly simple. Even in these bad economic times, businesses have to upgrade their equipment. Contact every golf course superintendent, member of a golf course, especially green’s committee members, people that sit as directors at golf courses, equipment distributors, equipment service centers, and all people and places of similar ilk, and see if you can get someone to either donate or greatly discount a triplex. Here’s just a sample of what I’m talking about. http://www.gcduke.com/triplex.html

The only thing wrong with equipment like that is, it CAN NOT BE ABUSED and HAS TO STAY IN GOOD REPAIR! Usually, some kind of “deal” can be made to do that since it would be a deductible donation. With a machine like that, the time to cut an infield and the foul territory would be in the half hour or less range, and it would do a super duper job if the machine were in good repair.

As for Bermuda as a baseball grass, if you’re in the sun belt, it’s a fantastic option. There is another thought though, but not many people give it consideration. There’s nothing that says a reel mower is necessary for Bermuda. Bermuda’s a grass that won’t grow “up”, but rather grows more sideways. The end result is, it isn’t likely it would ever get more than a foot tall if it was never mowed. So, a rotary mower can be used on it, but no matter how good the rotary mower, it just can’t do the same kind of job a reel mower can. But, they can do pretty well, especially if mowed regularly, like every other or every 3rd day.

IEBSL,

If you can mow all that in "about an hour, either you're guys are running behind the mower, you have very little foul area, or you're mower is 3 or 4 feel wide. That's one heck of a lot of area to mow!

lol...I could post video if your interested. The thing that cuts down are time, and I know this will sound funny, is that we use multiple trash cans so we are never doing more that walking a few steps to dump the grass.

I can believe how less time walking to empty a grass catcher would save lots of time.

For a mind exercise, figure out how far the guy mowing has to walk. Our field has about 6,500 sqft of turf on the IF, and about 10,000 sqft from the dugouts to the base paths from the backstop to 1st and 3rd. When you figger it out, assuming your mower is roughly 2’ wide, if all that grass was laid out in a straight line, it would be right around a mile and a half. Of course that means a pace of 3 MPH would use up a half hour.

Now factor in that you have to make a 180 every 90’ or so, and you have to empty the clippings, and you can see that whoever’s mowing is movin’ at a pretty good clip to get everything done in a half hour. I tip my hat to the person doing it because s/he’s a better person than I!

That’s why when we got our tri-plex for our Ifs, I was tickled to death. I could get the mower, service it and drive the ½ mile to our park from the yard, double cut both the big and little fields to 3/8. Drive back to the yard, wash the mower and put it away in less than an hour. With the used walk behind greens mower we bought from the golf course, it would take at least 3 times that long. And a big benefit was, because it took so little time, it could be mowed every day, and that meant no grass catchers were necessary. All in all, if someone can get their hands on a tri-plex, its really the only way to go.

But this little thread has a lot more to offer than what kind of mower to buy. It points out that maintaining a field has a cost, and depending on the level of maintenance you want, it can be an enormous expense. Heck, the park where our local fields are is about 8 acres total. That’s a full sized s****r field, a big baseball field, a little baseball field, and a softball field. During the summer here just outside Sacramento, it costs us over $2K per month just for water!

Thank you, guys.