AN in-house designed machine heralds Shelbourne Reynolds' entry into the flail mower market.

The Bury St Edmunds-based company will launch its own flail mower at LAMMA 2018 – at Peterborough in January 17 and 18, stand R56).

With a working width of 2.8m and transport width of 3m, the FBO 2800 flail mower is designed and manufactured at the firm’s Stanton, Suffolk, factory, and complements its established range of hedge trimmers also built there.

The mower can be either paired with one of these machines in a front/rear combination or rear mounted on its own.

“We tested the water with a flail mower model imported from Italy, but our engineering designers have now created our own machine, built to match our largest hedge trimmer models,” pointed out Neil Smith, sales and marketing director for the business.

“That means it can cope with the sort of high-power tractors often used with our HD800 hedge trimmers, and is sufficiently robust should it come into contact with tough material or a foreign object.”

Built to a heavy-duty specification, the FBO 2800 has a double-skinned shell comprising two layers of 4mm-thick steel.

From the pto shaft, drive is transferred through a gearbox rated to take up to 235hp, depending on unit specified. Power then passes to the 220mm rotor via a series of five V-belts, rather than the more usual four, with large-diameter pulleys to maximise the amount of belt wrap and minimise any possibility of belt slippage in tough conditions. By swapping pulleys, the mower can be run using either 540rpm or 1000rpm shafts.

The front cowl has an open throat design, to ensure it can accept large amounts of material, but towards the rear this becomes narrower to create a suction effect and ensure vegetation is completely pulverised.

There is a choice of either 24 T-flails, which are 110mm-wide, or where finer mulching is required, 54 C-flails, which are 60mm-wide. Both types have a 10mm overlap. The FBO 2800 also has 600mm hydraulic sideshift ability.

Also making its debut at LAMMA will be a new design of trailer for the widest combine cutterbars on the market. This has been created in response to the fact that tractors, rather than combines themselves, are now most commonly used to tow headers on the road, for reasons of manoeuvrability, weight and safety.

The new TABS trailer, available for both 10.5m (35ft) and 12m (40ft) cutterbars, takes its name from the fact it features a tandem axle, brakes and steering.

It offers improved manoeuvrability and road handling by eliminating the usual front bogie on header trailers of this size, being fitted instead with a leaf-sprung twin axle bogie, with both axles incorporating lockable hydraulic steering. These offer 45-degree turning, for easier control and manoeuvring than a mechanically-steered trailer.

A new I-beam chassis with tapered extensions provides greater strength and more ground clearance, and the trailer frame features a new ‘V’ locking bracket to help guide the header into place.