ATV Accessories And Tools - Abused

Swisher 44-Inch Tow-Behind Trailcutter
Mowing the yard or clearing the brush off your land is about the last thing you want to be doing. Done the old-fashioned way, with a hoe, weed whacker or rake, it can be downright backbreaking. And the current crop of ride-along mowers have a hard time with anything larger than grass blades, let alone rugged terrain. Since we had a few large mowing jobs on the horizon, we looked into various options and found the Swisher 44-inch Trailcutter.

Nearly a commercial-level, or agricultural-specification, piece of equipment, the Trailcutter is roughly 550 pounds of machine. We assembled it in under an hour following the easy instructions, which are mostly for attaching the hitch. Ours had the 14.5-horsepower Briggs and Stratton motor (versus the 12.5-horsepower version), which included electric starting. As you can imagine, the motor has plenty of power and it started right up. There is a remote engagement (we attached the handle to the tow bar close to the hitch) driven through a belt and pulley system to the dual swinging blades.

Swisher claims the cutter will rip through sticks of up to 1.5 inches in diameter, and we can confirm this is true. In fact, we were cutting dry brush and small branches into the 2-inch range, just moving slowly so there wasn't too much cutting going on at once or it would slip the belt. If that happened, it was easy to stop, reach back and disengage the lever, then back out and whack slower. The motor hardly bogs down and seems to have good momentum with the blades. Being abusive (isn't that what this is about?), we tried to chop too thick of brush, to hit stumps and to cut way too much bulk at once, and the only causality was the belt slipping more and more until it finally grew too hot and started smoking. We suggest having a spare belt around anyway. We also thought more stuff would fly out and hit the rider of the quad, but all he got was dusty in the dry conditions.

The best feature of the Trailcutter is its ability to be set up to cut offset to either side of the quad. Just change the angles of the swivel joints on the hitch arm, which is easily accomplished with quick-release pins. That way you don't have to ride through the thick brush and the cutter slices through a half-length more trail to the side you choose. The wheels are large enough to get through most rough ground, with strong metal deflectors built in front to guide the Trailcutter around obstacles like stumps or rocks. The cut is adjustable from two to seven inches in height via a threaded handle.

We cleared five acres of scrub brush and sage on very uneven ground in about five hours with the Trailcutter. We also used it to cut a bush runway in a thick grass meadow (again littered with sage). The Trailcutter took three to five minutes to accomplish what it would take a human and a hoe one hour to do, making the $2060 price tag seem a lot more worth it. The price may be a tough pill to swallow initially, but the machine is clearly built tough and worth every penny in backbreaking labor it will save you. It leaves a nice mulched wake of destruction in its path and arguably makes mowing fun.-Jimmy Lewis