Vicon KM-series trailed mower conditioners: Vicon was a major player with its Olympus and KM242 Swather in the 1980s. Then came the firm’s modular cutting deck GMT and GMV ranges in the early 1990s, followed in 1996 by the subjects of this article, the KMT2800 and its successors. James de Havilland assesses their merits as a second-hand buy
When first introduced, it was the all-new High Performance Conditioner (HPC) design that marked out Vicon’s KM mowers. It almost became the firm’s trademark and certainly a unit inextricably linked to the Vicon name.
Indeed, available in both mounted and trailed forms, the main mower element went largely unnoticed as attention initially focused on HPC. But the new KM-series were also fresh from the ground up, benefiting from a different suspension on the trailed models and a completely revitalised bed design. Moreover the latter was a known weak spot on earlier machines, which had earned Vicon mowers a less than glowing reputation for reliability.
Trailed machines in the KM-series were first launched in 2.80m wide KMT2800 and KMT2800 HPC format, the non-HPC unit featuring a more conventional finger conditioner and the mower’s bed comprising eight contra-rotating, three-bladed discs positioned on a suspension frame. The Free Float Suspension system – FFS – is still employed on current KMT3001 machines and enables full mower articulation vertically and laterally with 550mm of movement. Vicon claims that this allows the machine to follow uneven ground, including ridge and furrow contours, without a risk of scalping.
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