John Deere 220SL Reel Replacement and Reconditioning

28954 Views 108 Replies 32 Participants Last post by patricio_1025, 2 mo ago

Pete1313

Discussion Starter · Nov 4, 2017

"Reunited, and it feels so good"...

This was the mower that got it all started for me. The mower that made low cut KBG a reality at my last home. After selling it to a co-worker and he didn't use it to it's full potential, I bought it back from him. I am currently reconditioning it for a cool-season member here, and am excited that soon he will be low mowing cool-season grass as well. This is my favorite mower! It is a 2011 John Deere 220SL with an 11-blade reel. In the next few posts I will show how to replace the reel, bearings, bedknife, as well as some other things as I get it ready for it's new owner.

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MasterMech

· #13 · Nov 18, 2017

I'm very curious as to why you decided to keep the 11-blade setup. Especially for cool-season grass. Of course, this curiosity has NOTHING to do with two boxes from R&R sitting in my foyer. :nod:

One more bit of curiosity - did you go with Deere or aftermarket parts for the reel and knife?

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MasterMech

· #15 · Nov 18, 2017

Pete1313 said:
You piqued my curiosity! What's in the boxes in your foyer?

The 7-blade reel and high-profile bed-knife for the Jake. It's not doing as well as I had hoped with the 11-blade setup. Double-cuts are pretty much mandatory.

For the heights that most of us are mowing at, (over .375") I would think 7/8/9 blade reels would be desireable. We mowed PRG tee boxes @ .500" with 8 blade reels and I remember having to double cut with the walk mower (11 Bld) to rival what the triplexes were getting in 1 pass.

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MasterMech

· #17 · Nov 18, 2017

Pete1313 said:
MasterMech said:

The 7-blade reel and high-profile bed-knife for the Jake. It's not doing as well as I had hoped with the 11-blade setup. Double-cuts are pretty much mandatory.

Click to expand...

Sorry to hear about your cut quality issues. Hopefully the new knife and reel fix it. :thumbsup: I know I initially got stragglers and some missed cuts when I first started going low(even with the triplex with 7-blade QA5 reels). Once I kept up on the mowing, and the grass transitioned/learned the lower HOC, the stragglers and missed cuts disappeared. Since renovating, and keeping the KBG short from the start, the only time I got missed cuts is when I let it get too long between cuts (which was my fault and had to double cut). My experience is only with KBG though and not bermuda.

I'm actually mowing Annual Rye now @ about 1.25". So the weak canopy isn't helping anything for sure. The stuff grows at an insane rate, I'm getting nearly an inch of growth every 4 days. That would be a lot easier to keep up with if it didn't get dark at 5pm this time of the year or I wasn't mowing 20k of the stuff.

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MasterMech

· #32 · Nov 20, 2017

Great Job!

I just replaced the reel in the Jake and in doing so realized that I could probably do a better instruction set than what was in the Jake manual I have. Hopefully I will have a better shop setup the next time I dig into it that far. The lighting in my garage was very poor for taking pics, and my work space was limited to a small area, sitting on the floor. My garage is packed with all of our stuff from the move still, lots of my stuff and all of the kids ride-on toys. (Grumble grumble)

Back to my point, these kinds of write-ups like what Pete1313 has here are invaluable because nobody outside of golf and sports turf mechanics really rebuilds this type of equipment, leaving an ambitious DIY'r somewhat on their own for the knowledge necessary to avoid some expensive lessons!

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