Are DR Brush Mowers Worth What You Pay?

Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here from DirtFarmerJay.com. Recently, we purchased the DR Field and Brush Mower, the 26-inch model with a 14.5 horsepower engine. Well, we got the machine, we set it up, we put it to work around here, so let us give you the good, the bad, and the ugly. Stay tuned. Hey, Dirt Farmer Jay here. I love it when we find a piece of equipment that finds a great use around here, and we're able to share it with you, our YouTube family. Now, not everything's perfect on this machine, but it comes darn close. And what we're looking at is the Pro 26 DR Field and Brush Mower that is from DR Power Equipment. Now, in our description below, I've given you a detailed walkthrough. For those of you that are seriously considering purchasing this machine, I've given you a lot of detail, kind of like a robust review, much more than you probably find on a consumer site, just so you can get the skinny on it. And we've gone into a couple little things that we thought they could improve on as well. But we're going to walk you through a couple things. One, I want to show you how it looks when you get it. As you can see here, Dirt Farmer Maggie is walking around the crate that's on the trailer. That gives you a little bit of an idea of the size of the crating. It's an open crate. And the packaging includes the instructions being taped down. And as she removes that, keep that in a safe place. And you actually want to read all of that before you get in the machine. It's that good of a machine, and it deserves your respect and full attention. And as she rotates around the rest of the crate, you can take a look and see just how it's crated, as well as some of the strapping they put in it. Notice that the tires are very nice. They're robust, already filled. They already have the slime or the anti-flat compound in it. And then you can see a little bit more where the equipment is strapped. Now, here in this shot, you can see that the equipment arrived very clean. It's pristine. It was packed very well. And the instruction manual also tells you how to uncrate it. So you can see right here that there is a very precise attachment of the top protective crate to the skid that it's on. And where I'm pointing there, you'll see that has to be separated in a specific way. The instructions tell you how to do that as well. And then look how nice the machine is. Now, it's mostly assembled. You have two components, essentially. You've got the whole power unit with the control and the handle, the yoke. All that is already done. And then the deck itself. Notice when you go to unpack it, the deck is heavy. It's going to want to fall over on the unit. And nobody got time for that, because what you want to have is no scratches and dents. So make sure you put some kind of protective piece of either cardboard, a towel, a moving blanket, as you can see we've done here. And once you get it off of the crate itself, it's pretty straightforward from there. What you're going to do is slide the deck, which is quite heavy, but it's manageable. It's better if you have somebody helping you, although I did it solo using some blocks and everything to hold up the power unit, the engine unit, and then attach the deck to it. Once you get it together, you're not done yet. You need to put the fluids in it, put the right amount of oil in it. Each manual shows exactly what that engine needs and how much you're going to put in there. You want to make sure that the air filter is installed correctly. Mine was beautiful. It's easy to access. You're going to install the clips to the battery to get that ready. And then you're going to fuel the machine. And I go ahead and put stable in all of my power equipment so you don't end up with gas that is losing moisture or varnishing the carb and all that. So I go ahead and fuel it up correctly with regular gasoline and then the unleaded, that is. And then what you're going to do then is open the fuel valve that is under the gas tank, which is right over here, really easy to access. And at that point, this machine is ready to go. Now, everything is there. That's kind of a high speed. Now, once it is ready to run, we put this to work. As you can see in this shot, I'm actually out in our orchard area mowing that. It's quite dusty. I'm wearing full protection. Don't do something dumb like go out there and flip flops and cut offs and a short t-shirt that if you're, especially in rocky areas, even though I'm in a t-shirt, as you can see there, I like to wear gloves because of vibration transmission through the machine. Just take care of yourself and take care of the machine. And then you can see that the machine works really hard and fast. The air cleaner is really easy to access afterwards. Now, what we're going to do here is I'm going to walk around the machine in this next segment and show you some of the specifics and the features of the machine. And then I'm going to let you make the decision if you think it's worthwhile. I do have two little things, and I say this down in the description. One, the gear shift lever, which is very intuitive, does not have any detents in it. So it's a little bit difficult to know whether you're in first, second, or third in the forward gear, or if you're neutral, or you can tell when you're in reverse because you just pull it all the way down. Reverse is granny, by the way. But I will tell you over a short period of time, muscle memory develops and this machine becomes quite intuitive. It's balanced pretty nicely, so downward pressure on this allows you to lift the machine, which is part of the steering that you can utilize, as well as the caliper brakes and the handle brakes that are there. If you squeeze the right brake, the machine's going to pivot around on the right tire and go to the right and so forth. This is really helpful if you're transverse on a hill and the machine keeps wanting to go downhill. Well, you simply clamp a little bit on the left brake and that keeps bringing the machine in line so you're not having to muscle it. Let the machine do the work. One other thing I want to mention I think is really key and what I really like, and Dirt Farmer Maggie gave me the double thumbs up on this as well. The way the deck is configured, you'll see that the mouth is only open on the one end, meaning all the material that does get chopped down and that is helped facilitated by the low push bar on the front. It pushes over material and then it gobbles it up as you come into it. Everything that's chopped lies where it was chopped up, so all that organic material just drops where it is. There is no side discharge. The big benefit, what we really like, no wind rows. There's no rows to pick up afterwards. Everything is just right there chopped in place. It's a beautiful thing. Well, let's go ahead and do the walk around some of the features on this that allow you to easily maintenance the machine as well as operator controls. Let's take a look. As you can see, it is now a used machine. We did put it out there. I went ahead and washed this down afterwards and you'll notice that a lot of dirt and cuttings accumulates under the cover, the pulley cover. You can see here where I pulled off the cover and all of the things that are under it and then washing it out before reassembling it. So, we are now back looking at the different items on the machine. This machine is heavy duty and when you push on it and pull it down like this, of course, the front end is going to come up and this allows this to pivot a bit right there and to follow contour. If you want less pivot, this bolt right here on both sides has to get adjusted tighter to the chassis to limit its swing. But for most applications, this is the way it's mounted to allow it to contour, not scalp. Secondly, you have skid bars right here that run along on the ground and this bar right here takes tall weeds and pushes them down on the right orientation so that the blade, this is a 26-inch cutting swath, can cut them down. So, it does a great job. Notice on this machine there is no side discharge. There's a mouth on the front where the bar pushes it down and then there's a skirt all the way around. The advantage, all the material gets mulched in place and there's no wind rows afterwards, which I really like. Well, let's go ahead and have you come around the other side of the machine and we're going to take a look at the air cleaner. The air cleaner is very easy to get to. As I said, I have not serviced this, so let's just see what it looks like once it came off that dusty condition here. There's the compartment. You can see it really ingested some dust. We've got a little friendly guy there. Yep. And now what I'm going to do is go and pound that out or blow it back out, wipe it all down, wipe down this whole area to get this all clean, put it back in. It's really fast, really easy. Put the cover back on and it just twists back in place. Really nicely laid out engine on this. Coming around the side here, let's look up here in the operator controls here. So, first of all, here's your key and obviously it's got a stop. There's your crank and that's run. In certain accessory modes, you would actually have some headlights on this if you're adding a snowblower or something like that, but you're really using these three positions. You cannot start this machine unless it's in neutral. So, if you look over at this handle right there, there's the neutral position and we'll fire it up, but we'll just shut it off right away just to demonstrate. It is electric start in this model right here. So, it uses this smaller battery, which is more than adequate to turn this machine and we're going to go ahead and give it a shot here. I'm going to put it neutral, turn it over, we're going to turn the crank, boom, up it comes and I'll go ahead and put it down to our turtle. So, it idles very nicely. It's a very, like I said, a more industrial machine, 14.5 horsepower Briggs & Stratton Intech engine. Very nice. Let's go ahead and shut that off just so we can hear better. But once it is running, then you can shift it into any gear you want and if you look here, there's three forward gears and one reverse. It will not engage until you hit this handle right here, which says traction drive. Once you squeeze that and nudge the machine forward a little bit, it'll engage and start going either backwards or forwards. It's not necessarily a complaint, it's just something it took a little bit of getting used to. There are no solid detents on this. In other words, you don't feel it click, click, click. It's more of a feeling. So, when you put it there, I can see that it's in one, right there is two, three, but in the field, you're going to overextend it or end up kind of in between and all of a sudden it isn't working. After a while, like any piece of equipment, muscle memory will kick in and you'll get pretty darn good of going forward and backwards like when you're coming under a tree and coming back out of an area. So, that muscle memory kicks in, but the detents or even little ones I think would have been helpful. The engineers at DR decided not to install that or utilize that. So, it's not a big deal, but just thought you should know about it. All right, how about engaging the blade itself? Well, it's very heavy duty, lots of mass in the blade. It's rated for cutting up to two and a half inch saplings, plus just regular field work, grass, tall weeds that are... I hit some that were as high as five foot tall and were able to just take them down and work with them. Well, to make that happen, when the engine is running, you're going to use the engagement or if you want to call it the PTO. And once you do that, you have to come back over here to the left. Notice this handle called the operator presence handle. You've got to have that squashed down, which it's convenient to do anyway. Pretty much anytime on it, you're not going to have your hand under it. You're just going to go ahead and hold on to it. But if you pull up this PTO handle right here, without that owner presence handle down, the machine will die. It's a safety. It wants to know that you're out behind the machine, not anywhere near where that blade is. And if you're mowing along and somehow you fall down, the machine somehow gets away from you, you have some kind of emergency or distraction, and you let go of that handle, the machine is going to quit right in place. Engine stalls, it doesn't just drop to neutral, it just goes dead, which is a great safety on that. So keep that in mind that you're going to have when you're using the machine, you're actually going to have both of these down, the traction drive, the owner presence. Now that leads us to steering the machine. Well, there's a couple of ways you can steer it. One is to use the brakes themselves. And as you can see right here, if I squeeze this right brake, it's going to break the right wheel, making the other one transferring power to the other side, making the machine pivot around to the right. Same goes in the left. If I leave this one out, but squeeze the left, it's going to stop this wheel, transfer power to the right, and the machine will pivot around to the left. I found that I was using braking probably 40% of the time, 60% of the time when the machine was going along, and I would simply rake it up like this, rock it back on its wheels, and turn like this very easily. And it worked just fine. And you'll kind of work out your own cadence and methodology of doing that. One other thing that I'll mention here, the speeds. Number one is a granny gear. It's really good for fine close-up work where you're trying to get next to something and you don't want to damage it, but you want to trim as closely and precisely as you can. Number two I found was a good walking speed general use. When I put it in three, it was almost a trot, but it's great for getting from point A to point B. And if you're in the mood to get a good workout and run along with the machine a little bit, number three works really well. You won't have any problem with the machine keeping up with you. It's not going to bog down except in the heaviest and wettest of materials. So well done on all this here. I said one more thing, but one more thing. Here we go. And that is the handle height. I'm about five foot eight, five foot nine. You can see about where my handles are. A shorter person, it may seem a little high, and whenever I was first using it, it felt like it was a little high. But the more I used it, the more I liked it because it was kind of like a natural position. You let the machine ride along, bump along. You're not having to actively work it unless you're coming onto something or going around a corner. You're having to rock it out of something, but it works very well. There is an instruction in the manual that tells you how to adjust the handles down slightly. I find this just perfect the way it is. And any good machine like this should be really easy to service, and that's one of the things I really like about this DR machine. Every element is out where it's easy to access. The batteries you saw a few minutes ago is right below the operator panel here. It's very easy to get to, to swap out, to clean the terminals, keep it charged, and so forth. The oil, look at the oil where it is. It's right up on top, and it makes it really easy every time you run it to make sure that you have adequate oil. And there we are, right between the dots there, and it's running beautifully. Makes it really easy, and there's a drain tube on the side to take care of draining the oil at the end of the season, putting in fresh oil before you put it away. The gas tank is incredible. It's right out here. It's really easy to get a gas can to it. Sometimes, some of these yard machines, you really have to use a long funnel or wheedle around to get the tank near it. Not with this machine. It's right out there, really handy. I know that you'll appreciate that as well. Well, DR, I think you did a great job. I do have a comment on the shipping process that I'm not going to do on video. If you're interested in how it went as far as receiving it and getting it out here in that process, I have a couple of improvement suggestions for DR, and I put those down in the comments below. If you're interested in this machine or any of their lines, visit the link down below. We're pleased with the machine. We know it's going to work hard for us for a long time. This is no lightweight machine. Hey, if you found this video to be helpful, won't you like it? And better yet, why don't you like our channel and ring the bell so anytime that we put out a new video, you get notified as part of our viewer family. Hey, thanks for watching today. Until the next time, this is Dirt Farmer Jay from DirtFarmerJay.com.