Proving some rotation

Harry Bloomfield · 2019-04-18T16:32:32+00:00

Its that time of year again...My tractor mower, sometimes suffers from the cutter blades coming to a stop due to becoming completely choked with grass. When that happens, it slips the drive clutch, but from the driving seat, there is no noticeable change in the noise and I carry on driving with no cutting taking place and damaging the clutch.I don't use a grass collector on the rear and because it tends to be another cause of it choking up, but I can look back and see grass cuttings being blown out the back when all is well. The drive clutch and its pulley output to the cutting deck, is under the engine.Ideally, I could do with a better way to be sure at a glance, that the clutch isn't slipping and the deck is being driven round. One idea I have is a magnet fixed to the edge of a pulley, rotating past a coil powering an LED mounted on the tractors dash. Has anyone any other suggestions?

Apr 18, 2019 Last reply: 7 years ago 24 Replies

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Harry Bloomfield 7 years ago

snipped-for-privacy@gmail.com explained on 19/04/2019 :

There is no way to make it visible in my line of sight. The cutter deck is (obviously) underneath, the duct from that, carrying the fan blown cut grass, goes below and exits at the very back.

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dennis 7 years ago

formatting link

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Davidm 7 years ago

diy!

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dennis 7 years ago

The review here tells you how to connect it.

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Same item but from china if you want to wait.

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Johnny B Good 7 years ago

TNP's suggestion does have the merit of not requiring any modification to the cutter blades. This, of course, assumes they aren't made out of non-magnetic stainless steel and assumes you can get your magnetised pickup coil within sensing range of the cutter blades.

I suspect you might have to amplify the output if you can't get it within a few millimetres of the cutter blades to generate enough voltage to drive a LED directly, in which case a low pass filter may be required to minimise the risk of false positives by interference signal pickup from the ignition circuit.

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