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.
The Potato Digger
October 13, 2010
We were keen to plant things this spring and I had two garden plots all worked up, so in one we put lots of corn and then finished it out with last year’s Russet potatoes cut up as seed.
All went well until we began to worry about a raccoon attack upon the corn. There was nothing for it but to put up the electric fence. It clicked away and we relaxed. No raccoons attacked, even though I noticed some weeks later that the end of the wire attached to the fencer was hanging down behind the generator, grounding against it. So there never was a shock in the line, but the raccoons stayed away anyway.
The unintended consequence of this was that the potato patch was protected not only from raccoons, but also from the roto-tiller. The weeds joined in with the rampant growth of potato plants to make a thick, green mass.
It all came to a head last weekend when my wife announced that it was time to plant the garlic. “Uh, there are still four rows of potatoes in that space.” Bet waited until I was away and had at it with a garden fork. She made good headway, filling a wheelbarrow with a frenetic morning of digging. Then she could barely move for the rest of the week.
I decided to grab a fork and dig the things and be done with it, but I didn’t last as long as Bet before my back showed signs of giving out.
There’s nothing like a lame back to make a man think.
When I was little, my dad used a walking plough behind Old Jess to furrow the potatoes in and then dig them up again. He and Old Jess would roll them out neatly, and Glenda, Mom and I would scramble to pick them up before the next pass.
First I tried and discarded the furrower attachment for the tiller because it didn’t dig deeply enough to root out the potatoes without making gritty French fries out of them. Removing the tiller’s tines would be a lot of work, and the purpose of this procedure was to save labour, not increase it.
Internet research suggested that garden tractors don’t do well on ploughs. For example the leading maker of garden ploughs uses a 33 hp, 4WD tractor to pull the little single-bottom 12″ unit in demonstrations. Turning the soil requires weight and traction.
But I have two 35 hp tractors. Why fool with a toy when I can use the real thing? Out I went to the pile of weeds by the barn. My first plough, a 3 pt. hitch 3 X 16″, lay mouldering there, easily the worst implement I have ever bought. It was so poorly balanced, bent and awkward that I put a hole in the floor of my trailer just loading the thing. Later I tried removing one of the moldboards to see if that would help. It didn’t, but my friend Tom ended up with a brutally effective anchor for a floating dock from the left third of the plough.
I resolved to build an adult-sized, single-bottom plough from the remaining scrap iron and use it as a potato digger. An hour of fruitless grinding at the bolts at least allowed enough time for the penetrating oil to work, and after a few satisfying smashes with an eight-pound sledge the nuts turned right off. I dropped the right third of the assembly and put it back together with just the centre section remaining.
The only way to keep the thing upright while I hitched it to the TAFE was to hold it off the ground with the Massey.
Away I went to experiment on the potatoes. Down went the plough point. Ahead surged the tractor. A magnificent furrow appeared behind. Perfect, except that I didn’t see a single potato.
Maybe I missed the row. Tried again. Now I had two, almost parallel furrows, and no potatoes. Now what? Keep trying? A third pass between the others and a few fractions of potatoes appeared.
I walked along the row. An occasional potato fell out at my kicks. Before long I was digging through the debris by hand, looking for survivors. Most showed grievous injury, though a few small tubers had escaped.
More passes with the plough and the garden took on the appearance of a compost heap after a good turning. But the potatoes weren’t coming out of the ground the way they did for my dad and Old Jess.
So I gathered up the pitiful survivors in a large plastic pail and set it in the loader for the ride to the house. Started off. Heard a “crunch.” Somehow the pail had fallen out of the loader and I had crushed it under the tractor. Once again I rounded up the dwindling supply of potatoes and trundled them up the hill, ruing yet another session with this last remnant of the sorriest of all possible ploughs.
the Walnut Diary 