Garden Tractors for the Small Country Place

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A specialized segment of the industry manufactures turf equipment for golf courses, sports fields and estates. Their heavy-duty equipment fits in price and capacity midway between garden and compact tractor lines, and will appeal to those with extensive lawns to manicure. Several firms make super riding mowers with 60inch mower decks in front, engines in the rear over a single rear steering wheel so they can turn in less than their total length. Steiner Turf Equipment of Dalton, Ohio, makes a crimson line of garden accessorized tractors with 4-wheel drive and an articulated chassis-with a hinge in the middle-to make super-tight turns.

Most generic lawn and garden machines have generic Briggs or Tecumseh engines and drive-train components from Peerless and they are repairable by any small engine shop. But some-in particular MTD, little-known in its own right, but maker of dozens of name-brand and private-label tractors-manufacture their own transmissions. All makers fabricate or subcontract their own chassis and sheet metal and make and/or assemble their own steering gear and controls.

No repair shop can carry all components for any single-engine maker in stock ...to say nothing of running gear, front-end parts for all models of all the thousands of tractor models made by a dozen manufacturers over the past four decades. A good mechanic can fix any engine, and locate most modern-era parts given enough time (Briggs has the intriguing habit of changing its entire parts cataloging system every few years, just to keep the rest of us from feeling like experts.). And, a talented small-engine mechanic can substitute some parts and fabricate others (for a price).

I've rambled on about the history and structure of the industry partly out of nostalgia, but mainly to show how many original equipment manufacturers (makers of the tractors themselves) and how many engine-makers there are. Due to frequent mergers, brand-name sales and chaotic outsourcing throughout the industry, you really never know which company actually made a given model of tractor in any given year, or which engine from what manufacturer goes with it. I can't begin to list the hundreds of job shops small and large that make controls, front-end parts, electrical components, sheet metal parts, wheels and tires and on and on. Plus, a large-volume customer can specify a limited number of special features on an engine, transmission or differential. As a result, the changeable Briggs parts catalog is the size of an unabridged dictionary and repair manuals for MTD products begin with the ominous advisory: "DUE TO THE LARGE NUMBER OF MTD MODELS AND THE WIDE VARIETY OF ENGINES INSTALLED, AN ACCURATE CROSSREFERENCE TABLE IS NOT AVAILABLE."

In other words, in this wonderfully wild, woolly, vigorously competitive segment of American industry, nobody has a real handle on who supplies what part to whom. To further confuse matters, not all tractor, engine and running-gear brands are distributed nationally, not all nationally distributed brands are sold and serviced in every section of the country and not all models are sold in every rural community.

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