Bolens G174/Iseki 1500 Review
August 10, 2011
Mike
Northeast Connecticut
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Mike:
Yes, the 17 hp diesel has lots of power to run 48″ mowers through whatever I face. Its radiator sheds seeds well and doesn’t plug in tall hay or weeds. It bulls through spruce boughs without damage. In 4 low it’s a mountain goat, even with turf tires. The diff lock is occasionally useful.
The smooth tires aren’t so great in mud pulling a trailer, but that’s to be expected. On the other hand the Bolens will mow over soft ground that I can’t touch with my heavier tractors until much later in the year.
It doesn’t have enough lift to skid logs with my mid-sized winch, but the pto will pull them out to the road and it will carry the 500 pound implement around for me.
It needs the three weights on the front. Beware rearing with a load on the 3 pt hitch on a hill unless you have the weights. It has no overrunning clutch, so you MUST buy and attach one to the pto shaft before running a rotary mower. A finish mower is fine without.
Without live pto the Bolens would make a lousy snowblower tractor. Beware leaving the key on. It kills the battery on mine. Parts are available.
The thing gets way more hours than I anticipated.
Buy one of those triangles for trailer hitches. It’s very handy for jockeying trailers around the lawn between mowing sessions.
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UPDATE, 14 MARCH, 2013
For the winter I have fitted the tractor with a pair of tire chains off my dad’s old military surplus jeep. I extended the chains about 2 to 3″ with extra links for the fit. The increase in traction meant that the Bolens could work all winter if I kept it out of the cold. It doesn’t like to start without plugging in if it’s much below freezing. The simple solution was to appoint it Garage Queen for the winter. That way there was always a clear path among the woodworking tools to the woodpile, and its primary function was to haul wood to the pile on its 10 cu. ft. 3 pt hitch dump box, anyway.
BTW: that dump box is an excellent implement for this tractor, if you can find one. Mine was marketed by Walco and I found it used at a farm equipment dealer. Several searches of the Internet haven’t turned up another example of the type, though.
In early winter while my 35 hp loader tractor was broken down I pressed the Bolens into service on a 7′ 3 pt hitch blade. It lifted and dragged the blade well enough, but as snow volume increased it had nowhere nearly enough weight to shift the drifts away from the centre of the long driveway. If you want to use the blade to clear a rink, the Bolens would likely do a good job, but it’s outgunned in heavy snow unless it has a front blower. The front pto operates independently of the 1 stage clutch, so it likely works well in this application.
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The Bolens uses about 1 litre of diesel per hour, and it’s a pleasant thing to run.
UPDATE, 29 December, 2014
The Bolens originally had a pair of hydraulic auxiliary fittings installed, so I reconnected them.
I have used the Bolens a great deal over the last year on a small hydraulic tipping trailer I bought new. The single axle Chinese import is 44″ wide and about 7′ long with sides about 15″ high. A pair of off-road tires sit beneath the box. The sides and/or the tailgate fold down for loading, and of course it can be configured as a little dump truck. It holds about 3500 pounds of gravel without distress.
It’s very handy for pruning trees. The rig fits down narrow alleys and turns easily.
For firewood I find the best feature of the trailer is the folding sides. I can slide substantial blocks onto the bed, then shift them to the block splitter with only the single lift from the ground.
The rig is also small enough I can back it into my workshop for easy stacking of firewood right from the trailer bed.
While the Bolens doesn’t have the hydraulic pressure (1600 lb/sq. in.)to dump a trailer load of gravel (neither does my TAFE), my 21 hp Kubota B7510 with its system tuned to 2600 lb. tows and dumps gravel quite well.
Hope this helps,
Rod
Update 13 September, 2015
The following article contains an accident report of some significance. Short version: don’t tow a trailer much wider than your tractor.
UPDATE: 18 MARCH, 2019
The Bolens is still working around the farm. I should mention a session it had at the local tractor dealer, though. The clutch began to misbehave in early 2017, working only intermittently. Eventually it quit clutching, so I loaded the tractor onto a trailer and dropped it at Feenstra’s Farm Equipment in Athens.
A few days later they called and I picked it up only to face a bill of a bit over $900. It was all for labour.
Turned out the clutch was full of mud, and it took twelve hours with a toothbrush (metaphor) to clean up the bell housing, the clutch plate and the rest, and re-assemble the tractor. The tech also cleaned the glow plugs.
The only time the tractor had been stuck in mud was when I buried it in clay at my friend’s house while we were landscaping under his deck posts with a box scraper. It spent the night in the springy bog, and the clutch-contaminant must have leaked back into the bell housing through the drain. That was four or five years before the clutch actually quit working.
It starts better in winter now since I went with Shell Rotella 0W50 synthetic oil. The tractor hauls the trailer when the Kubota is on the wood chipper. Around the lawns it’s handy to get rid of the chips without having to rake them up. For extended runs on the 7.5 kw pto generator, I use the Bolens because it uses so much less diesel than the 21 hp Kubota, as well. But its primary use is to jockey trailers around the yard. Its 3 pt hitch will lower the hitch bar right down to the ground. The Kubota’s is held up pretty high by the design of the tractor and the mid-mount mower.
Spring and fall involve lawn cleanup. I run both small tractors at this, the Kubota on an estate rake, one of those things with a series of four rotating, vertical rakes suspended over a little triangular trailer, producing a windrow. I follow it with the Bolens on a ground-driven sweeper to gather up the munge in spring and the leaves in fall. I can get over the two acres of lawns in a few hours, spread over about a week, as things dry out in spring or leaves fall in October.
I should mention as well that I had to order new front tires for the Bolens from the local tire dealer. They cost a bit over $400 installed for the pair, but they are identical to the original tires. I don’t know if they make rear tires for the tractor any more, but there are still years of life left in them yet.
Blasted tractor’s wrecking my body!
August 7, 2010
This latest tractor keeps finding new ways to wreck my back. Take Friday’s misadventure for example: Bet and I had to run up to Kingston to pick up some new pulleys for the mower which runs on the back of the little Bolens tractor. Trouble is, the thing eats belts. Inside a month I have gone through four. They are scarce and expensive, though I have found a Belarus Tractor dealer in Wisconsin with a sideline in v-belts who sends them to me from an outlet near Stratford.
A talk with Peter Myers narrowed the problem down to the sheaves (what I would call pulleys) which were severely pitted from corrosion. V-belts are tough, but they must have a smooth surface on which to run. He suggested the sheaves are a stock item and that I should simply replace them.
And so I did. Then I dropped Bet at a supermarket and had an hour to kill. The other trouble with the Bolens is that its seat doesn’t have any springs, so I have to pad my spine with two pillows if I want to stay on the tractor for any length of time. The big Canadian Tire next door to the food store should have parts for lawn tractor seats. I’d find a way to adapt them.
CTC didn’t have any compression springs for the purpose, but I ran into something else which made me forget all about the tractor project. It also let loose the latent Walter Mitty in me: next to the sports department they have set up what looks like a narrow plexiglass squash court, but at the end is a hockey net. Monitors across the ceiling display information about the moving pucks. A rack with several dozen carbon fibre hockey sticks stands outside.
I wanted to try it. It matters not a bit that I am no hockey player – nor that I haven’t had skates on since a field trip to the Rideau Canal Skating Rink during my rookie year as a teacher. Nor that my two elderly colleagues, Ralph Greenhorn and Ernie Hogan, had to tow me against a stiff headwind the 4.8 miles back to Dow’s Lake from the Chateau Laurier. The muscles in my back had seized up and I simply couldn’t move. So much for skating.
Nonetheless, I wanted to try to fire a slapshot through a radar gun, just to see.
I paid my money and a bemused hockey jock from the sports department set me up with the softest, shortest, right-handed stick he could find. He joined me in the shooting court to control the flow of pucks from the pitching machine and offer advice.
He warned me to shoot, not to hesitate, or I would “get buried under pucks.” The first white disk squirted along the “ice” from the machine at a steady 22 mph. I stopped it and took aim at the net, noticing a little light had illuminated the lower right hand corner of the net. I shot at it and hit the net, along the ice, dead centre. It must have been that blinking light throwing me off, because I discovered my chances of hitting the target at a range of twenty feet were about as good as those of hitting the areas to either side or above the net, or even the face of the pitching machine. This was the most inaccurate hockey stick I have ever handled.
What’s more, it was one of the slowest. Like anyone else’s, my memory is full of cannonading blasts past goaltenders on the ponds and rinks of youth, even though most of the time I played goal because I had a good glove hand and couldn’t skate.
But in the cruel glare of the radar gun, my best slapshot — the one that caught the upper left corner of the net at the same time the light blinked in the lower right — clocked in at 35.1 miles per hour. Thirty-five? But Zdeno Chara fires a slapshot over a hundred!
The attendant told me my shots were about average for a fourteen year-old hockey player. “Lots of junior-level players fire wrist shots over 80 mph.” The store doesn’t let them try slapshots in the confined area, but my coach didn’t seem too worried about my flailing attempts. In fact he loaded the machine up again, twice more. The pucks off my rented stick didn’t get any faster, though once I stopped staring at the flashing lights in the corners of the net my response time became much better. I even hit the correct corner of the net the odd time.
Eventually my spine had taken on an interesting new shape, my arms felt like lead, my head pounded, and I decided to call it a day. I thanked my coach and reeled out of the store thinking, “That hockey booth is a really cool thing to try. Now whom could I lure into it for a puck-blasting session?”
By the following morning I could hardly get out of bed. I moaned around the house for the rest of the weekend, all the while blaming that blasted tractor for wrecking my body yet again.
the Walnut Diary 