Many types of mowers are used throughout the professional turf care industry, including fairway mowers, riding or walking greens and tees mowers, rotary or reel rough mowers, and trims, surrounds, and slope mowers.
Read More (About Mowers)Turf care pros know that there’s no one machine that can take care of every job. On the contrary, most golf course grounds crews use a combination of mowers designed specifically for manicuring fairways, greens, roughs, and other surrounding landscape. While they all perform a similar function, they are designed with a variety of distinct, specialised features that make some mowers better-suited for some applications than others. (For new and used lawn mowers for use on acreages, farms, or residential lawns, visit Farm Machinery Locator.)
Fairway mowers are often among the largest and widest turf maintenance machines on the course because groundskeepers need them to cover the most ground; they often incorporate as many as five or seven cutting reels (or gang reels). John Deere sells PrecisionCut and E-Cut Hybrid fairway mowers with cutting widths of up to 330 centimetres (130 inches) to cut more grass in fewer passes. One popular example is the John Deere 8000 fairway mower, which is powered by either a 42.1-horsepower (31.4-kilowatt) Stage V or 37.1-hp (27.7-kW) Stage III A engine and has a cutting width of 203 cm (80 in).
Greens and tees mowers come in both riding and walking varieties. Riding models are similar to fairway mowers but are typically more compact as they are used to maintain smaller areas and need to be more manoeuvrable. They must also be very precise to create the smoothest possible playing surfaces throughout a course.
Although there are new technologies that have leveled the playing field to a degree, riding greens and tees mowers are often considered less precise than walk-behind alternatives, but they do have cutting widths of up to 157 cm (62 in) compared to the 56-cm (22-in) top end for walking mowers, which means greater efficiency. However, because cut quality is typically prioritised over speed for greens and tee boxes, walk-behind mowers play an important role on many courses.
Jacobsen sells the popular Eclipse range of greens and tees mowers, which includes Eclipse 322 riders and Eclipse2 walk-behinds with cutting widths of up to 157 cm (62 in) and 66 cm (26 in), respectively.
The two most common styles of rough mowers are rotary and reel, and each has its own strengths when it comes to cutting various types of rough. For example, because rotary mowers don’t offer the same consistency of cut quality as do reel alternatives, they are well-suited for cutting primary rough, which is typically somewhere between 5 and 7 cm (2 and 2.75 in) in length. Reel mowers, on the other hand, are typically more precise and can cut grass at lower lengths, which is required for the intermediate rough that is located just on the edge of the fairway.
Depending on the model and the machine type, many rough mowers feature contour decks that can handle uneven terrain as well as adjustable height-of-cut systems for achieving the desired grass length. Grounds crews often used rough mowers to cut walkways for golfers and spectators, as well.
One of the most popular rough mower lines is Toro’s Groundsmaster series, which includes riding mowers as well as mowers designed to be pulled behind a utility vehicle or tractor. Toro’s rotary rough mowers have cutting widths of between 229 and 488 cm (90 and 192 in), putting them in a similar size category as fairway mowers.
A key feature of trim, surrounds, and slope mowers (aka “contour mowers”) are floating decks that tilt to keep the blades in contact with the grass on inclines, around bunkers, and on other terrain variations. Many of these machines have multiple decks or wings that lift up and out of the way when not in use. Jacobsen sells several AR-series contour rotary mowers, including the AR522 with five floating decks. It has a maximum cutting width of 229 cm (90 in) and a height-of-cut range of between 1.9 and 13 cm (0.75 and 5.1 in).
Regardless of which type you’re in the market for, you’ll find a large selection of new and used mowers for sale on NeedTurfEquipment.co.uk from such popular brands as Dennis, Jacobsen, John Deere, Ransomes, and Toro.