Three knives per disc and a substantial frame are the two distinguishing features on Vicon’s KMT 3000 mower, which was introduced for the 1997 season. profi tested a central drawbar version throughout the whole season under a range of working conditions.

Isn’t that mower’s framework a bit fancy, we asked? Vicon’s reply: It’s down to the modular design concept; the same base frame is capable of accommodating either a disc or drum mower and comes with a choice of three conditioners.

Choices, choices, and yet morechoices… For our test we took the trailed disc version of the KMT3000, fitted with swinging steel flail conditioner. Alternatively, the machine is offered with ribbed rollers for leafy forage or the HPC intensive conditioner with both ribbed and bristle rollers (profi international 5/97). The HPC conditioner and the drum mower incorporate more metal than the other modules, hence dictating the seemingly ‘over the top’ frame on the lighter versions.

At 2.4m wide, the flail conditioner rotor measures 60cm less than the cutterbar’s working width, with the outer of the eight contra-rotating discs feeding the crop back into the conditioner. The conditioning rotor rotates at a constant 775rpm, a speed which is not adjustable – a potential drawback? In effect, the only way to reduce conditioning intensity is to set the baffle plate at a greater distance from the rotor. This stepless adjustment is made by simply turning a crank handle on the right-hand side of the mower.

Yet Vicon says that, even though the conditioner tines rotate at a fixed circumference speed of 24.3m/s, the crop can still be treated gently when the baffle plate is at its widest setting. Perhaps, then, a fixed rotor speed is no bad thing. Indeed, in our test this proved to be the case: When taking our first cut of ryegrass we failed to pick up any difference in drying characteristics between the grass gently conditioned by a KMT 3000 and the grass cut by a ‘conditioner-less’ mower

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