Will Kelly shows Military Lawn Cuts crews how to prep mowers before each route: swap in a fresh blade, clean the air filter, and check the oil. A dirty blade leaves mohawk cuts and angry customers. Dark oil gets a red tag and the mower stays home.
This is the pre-loading instruction anytime that you are going out on the mow route. The first thing we do every single morning is we change the blade and we put a fresh mower blade on. So as you can see, it's a nice fresh blade. When I first started, I used to go out and only change the blades every maybe third day. What I found was there were weeks that would go by that we would get consistent complaints from customers saying that we were leaving mohawks in the yard, and I'd have to go back over the same pathway twice to make sure I'm getting the cleanest cut. So here at Military Lawn Cuts, we put a fresh blade every morning on the mower. So the way that we do that is we simply turn over our mower, take our tool, which is a 5/8. All right, so let's go ahead and take this off. So mind you, before you actually take this off, I want to show you guys This blade is where it's cutting. This piece needs to protect the cutting area. We're going to go ahead and take the old blade while we're doing this and scrape off any excessive grass that's underneath the deck. Now that we've scraped our deck and gotten majority of that excessive grass, we're going to go ahead and take our new blade. We're going to take our guard. So the cutting end always needs to be protected by this guard. So when the blade is spinning and it hits something, it protects it. All right, so you're going to take the bolt, you're going to go ahead and put this back in, and then we're going to line it up horizontally to the horizontal piece. And then we'll go ahead and grab our gun. Now when you're putting this on should be on number 2 torque, and you just want to spin it a couple times. That's it. If you overtighten this bolt, it is a pain to get off, so do not overtighten it. Just a couple of times and you should be good to go. The next thing you're going to do after you put a fresh blade on it is you're going to clean out the air filter. The reason why we want to clean out the air filter on this is because Every morning we need to make sure that there's no debris or gunk that's going to get sucked up into the engine. So if you look down here, this is the intake of where air goes through. And so if there's dirt and debris in here, it's going to get sucked up into the engine, and then the piece of equipment will not work while you're out in the field. Just go ahead and blow it out as such. You can take this off, bang it a few times, get that dirt out. Sometimes you can take a blower to this lightly, like a light idle blower, and just blow this out. So go ahead and put the foam piece back on, line up your holes once it's clean. And this is every morning, we're putting a fresh blade on and a clean air filter. The last thing we do is check the oil because we want to make sure we're not burning up an engine. If it looks like that— if it looks like this, go ahead and put a red tag on this piece of equipment. This is not something I would bring out in the field. This oil is basically dark black, so I'll show you exactly what it should look like. It's okay if it's a little light brown, but this is one that got recently changed. This one has nice clean oil in it and it is good to go.
