DON - When I mulch leaves, the grass is 4-5 inches tall, and the layer of leaves on top of the grass is six inches thick in many places. And I always mow to a 3 to 3-1/2 inch cut height. There's NO green grass visible in front of my mower, only behind the deck. I have about a dozen soft maple trees that are 50+ ft tall around the outside of my property, and close to that big in diameter and when the leaves fall they make a heavy mat of leaves over that whole area. MANY other deciduous trees besides those too. And my block-off mulching plate keeps all the leaves inside the deck and really chews them up. The leaves are almost powder when they finally find a way out of the deck. The few big pieces are at most 1/2 inch in diameter, most are 1/4 inch and less. They disintegrate much faster that way. If I had Gator blades on my 50C they'd work so much better for mulching. Yes, I have open places in my yard where there's no trees but enough leaves blow from under the trees to look about like the 2nd & 3rd pic you posted.
When I mulched with the 982 this fall I slowed to a creep under those Maple trees. Yes, I had HP in reserve but I wanted the leaves chewed up really well. Lets do the math, 50" deck divided by 20 HP equals 2-1/2 inches of deck per HP. With an Original the math is 38 inches of cut divided by seven HP equals 5.43 inches of deck per HP, over TWICE as much deck per HP, plus you can't slow to a creep unless you have a creeper gear or depress or slip the clutch on an O.
Geesh... I've worn-out 5-6 of those K161/181's. Don't you think I know what they CAN and CAN'T DO? And do you suppose there's a reason I put a K241 in my 72 27 yrs ago and replaced it with a K321 7 yrs ago.
Yes, an Original will mow the grass if you mow to a 3 inch height when the grass is up to 4-1/2 to 5 inches tall assuming your talking dry fescue grass and sharp blades. Let it get taller than that and you'll be in 1st gear and working it hard. If that grass happens to be lush crab grass as opposed to fescue then you'll be dropping into 1st gear mowing much over an inch off the grass. And that's all with DRY grass that mows easier than wet grass. The dry grass blows out of the deck and the wet grass sticks and plugs up the underside of the deck holding the clippings in using up more HP.
When I run the lawn vac with the 72 I put a set of modified blades on the deck that have verticle wings on the back edge of the blade sticking up so they really throw the clippings. The wings are 1" tall and 3-4 inches long. They pull VERY hard. Without the vac pulling the clippings out of the deck the K241 would not pull those blades to mow more than an inch of grass. Lots of times I could only vacuum half a mower swath if the volume of clippings & leaves was too great. Keep in mind the gross weight of the 72 & mower, vac unit, cart and load of clippings is around 2000# when the cart is full. Last spring when I vacuumed dry grass clippings the K321 pulled the vac just fine taking a full 38" swath and filling the cart with clippings in about 5-6 minutes, meaning I was moving a LOT of material.
A CC with a K161/181 is a fine little tractor to pull around a cart for yard work, or a lawn sweeper, maybe do a little work with a blade. There's even been some 7 & 8 HP CC's at plow days. But your post was beginning to sound like you were mowing foot tall weeds in 3rd gear!
HARRY - Yes, I think Kohler came out with a third version and maybe a fourth version of the gernade gears too. We had a good discussion on another L&G tractor forum about them several months ago. At best, they're a band-aid to an inherent imbalance Kohler designed into the K-series engines. And as the engines grew in displacement & HP the imbalance, hense, vibration grew worse.
Dave Kirk explained the situation to Wyatt & I when Wyatt & I visited Dave to pick up Wyatt's K321 Wyatt built for his Wheatland tractor. Piston engines have to be balanced to a certain range of "Imbalance" between the reciprocating and rotating weights. Dave works with those design issues daily at his Day Job. The K301/321/341 engines are WAY outside the acceptable range of imbalance, hense, they vibrate.
The gernade gears are a band-aid because there wasn't enough space for a proper balance shaft supported on both ends as is typical of other engines with counter-rotating balance shafts. A gear with an over-hung bob-weight hanging off a single needle bearing is NOT a good design for something that by design is NOT balanced.
We know that the gernade gears cause problems. Dave has had the balance plates in his CC a L-O-N-G time with NO issues, only smooth running. Some people at that other forum wanted to wait and see for many years and thousands of hours of run time to see if the plates came loose, in other words, play the same game as a design engineer once wanted to play with our purchasing group, We wanted to replace FIVE different types of 1/4"-20 X 1/2" set screws in a machine with one type in all 5 places. The engineer responded to our value engineering exercise by telling us, "Build one that way and run it 24-7 for thirty years and let me know how it goes..." In other words, "It's my design and leave it to heck alone!
On the K-series engines over-all, Kohler gets an A, on the response to customer's request for a smoother single cyl engine Kohler gets a B+. But on the design of the fix for smoother running they get a D-. For the execution of fitting everything inside the engine and using a high number of common existing parts they get a B+ also.
