Toro DPA Triplex Reels

So I have this thing about making sure that every cutting unit we purchase has the “ability” to be fine tuned to absolute 0. While accomplishing this is very tough my goal is always to get as close as I can. My belief is that consistency is the key to having the best greens in the world and the only way to achieve consistency is to have a set of cutting units that are exactly the same from cut to parallel to height of cut.

To have a clear understanding of what I mean you can take a surface plate and notice that as a cutting unit is out of square even down to .001 the weight gets shifted from one end of the cutting unit to the other. (I am working on how much weight) The more out of square the cutting unit the more the weight shifts. A few years ago I had a demo on the Toro DPA cutting units. New out of the box the cutting unit was .009 out of square and my concern was that knowing rollers are within .005 tolerance front and rear (.010 overall) and then also on top of that being .009 out of square that consistency would turn into inconsistency and more than likely get worse in the future. I was fortunate enough to have a few engineers from Toro in town that week and had the discussion with them regarding my issues with the cutting units not being in parallel and with no eccentric bolt there was no fine tuning except to use shims which would just get me close. The idea in my mind is not to get in the ballpark but when you set up a cutting unit you need to feel like you achieved something. There are so many things that have to be considered when setting up a machine to mow at .100 that everywhere you can fine tune it the better your chances of producing the high quality you are looking for. I believe in the future we are going to find out that a cutting unit in perfect parallel has a lot more to do with the consistency of a green surface then was ever realized.

Following those conversations and a few emails an eccentric bolt was born. After a trial run of the prototype at our facility and some slight modifications to its size the eccentric went into production. Now finally in 2012 we purchased the new DPA’s with the eccentrics and they work perfectly. I am sure many probably don’t know they exist so here are a few pictures.

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Cutting unit out of square by .017

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Toro Eccentric Bolt used to square cutting unit

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After adjustment cutting unit is perfectly square.

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