Pico’s Project: BCS 749 Two-Wheeled Tractor (Part 1)
Why did I buy a tractor?
I moved from Colorado where my lawn was the size of a postage stamp and easily maintained with an electric weed whacker and reel mower. When the family moved to Michigan we acquired some property. Two acres is a lot of property compared to a small subdivision yard! 1 acre of that property is wet lands with trees and brush, another 1/3 is trees & wild flowers, 1/3 is garden, and the last 1/3 is lawn which I’m trying to replace with white clover.
Did you know that things are expensive?
To be environmentally conscious, I hired a goat herd twice to eat through a lot of brush and poison ivy. The goats did a really great job and are super cute to watch. However, the owners of goat operations tend to have ‘interesting’ personalities and I could not get the goats to the property this year which lead to many overgrown areas. The house is on a private drive and I split the costs of snow removal of the drive with the neighbors. This does not include the house’s driveway & turnaround which is about 100ft long, so I opted to pay for plowing. The plowing did not include the path to the barn where we store the truck and that was another issue when there was a heavy snow fall. I value my free time and again opted to have lawn service to mow the grass and clover. Between goats, plowing, and mowing those expenses really added up. With two children in college, I need to start hustling. Using the yard services prices in my calculations and if I assume my labor is free, the tractor & accessories will pay for themselves within two years (if I bought brand new) and opens up some cash flow to be used on other expenses.
Why buy a Two-Wheeled Tractor?
Years ago, I had a vision of making a device that was mostly an engine and you would swap different components on to one engine. I though it was revolutionary and genius. It would be great if I only had to maintain one engine for a mower, tiller, wood chipper, wood splitter, snowblower, etc. I decided to finally do some market research… and that idea is as old as the internal combustion engine (I’m a little late to the game). A web search returned images and links to the BCS tractor line. I looked through it but I wasn’t that impressed. Coincidentally, one of the YouTuber’s that I follow ‘No-Till Growers’ did an episode that featured the tractor I was looking at. This sparked my full attention when the flail mower was discussed. One of my major issues is dealing with garden remnants, tall weeds, and undergrowth. A lot of things came together with a need to: reduce costs; remove snow; take down brush & wild areas; and mow grass. The flail mower could handle mulching the garden, the wild areas, and the white clover lawn and the snowblower attachment was reasonably priced. My mind was made up. This was the path forward.
A trip “Up North”
I was ready to a buy a new BCS tractor & accessories. However, I try to be conservative with my money and use it as a tool to buy only the things that are important to me (rather than have new vehicles, phones, and subscriptions). I pumped the brakes on buying branch spanking new and did a Facebook marketplace search for the tractor. It turns out there was a 2021 BCS 749 for sale that had very low usage and included multiple implements. Looking at the photos, I could tell that the person didn’t understand how to use the tractor as the motor was not in the correct orientation to drive the flail mower. An inquiry was made as to why it was being sold and there was a tragic story involved regarding a plane crash and the parents were selling the tractor that their son’s owned. Well, the price looked great and saved me about $4000 off from new. The only requirement I had was that it started (maybe I should’ve set the bar higher).
A meeting was set to come look at the tractor and the seller preferred cash. My lovely wife went to the bank and upset the poor bank teller as she almost ran the bank out of cash on hand. $100, $50s, and $20 made up the fat envelope. With cash in hand, I was ready. My mom’s super awesome husband (as my dad passed away in ’97) let me borrow his trailer with a ramp and took a 400 mi round trip with me to Charlevoix, MI to meet the seller. Northern Michigan is really beautiful with forests, rolling hills, farmland, and lakes to view and rivers to cross. Frequently, I consider relocating myself up there.
We made the trip without incident (other than disagreements about trusting Google Maps versus my step dad’s knowledge of the highways). The seller was a very nice guy and shared the tragic story again. You could feel the loss through his words. The tractor’s engine started and met my one requirement. There are a lot of levers on this tractor! It didn’t handle as well as it was demonstrated in the videos online. After a little finagling we got it loaded on the trailer with the ramp.
Together we loaded the other implements and the seller took a misstep off the trailer as he stepped backwards between the ramps and suddenly dropped 18". I’m happy to report that he was fine and didn’t roll his ankle (or worse). It was a scary moment. We loaded a couple of other implements that I didn’t really know what they were and didn’t know if they were compatible with the tractor, but I took them anyway to take them off the hands of the seller. Worst case, I could sell them for scrap.
We took a little side trip to Traverse City to visit my brother as we were in that part of the state. That is another beautiful place to visit with the shoreline paths and aqua blue water in the bay. After a lunch and a visit we hit the road. The bad news about the trip is that my truck (2010 Ford F-150) gets really bad gas mileage at highway speeds while towing. I typically refill my 32 gal tank between 420–440 miles on the trip meter and that usually takes 28 gallons. Well, we had to stop and fill up because we were still a bit away from home and I was under a quarter of a tank and I filled up with 30 gallons after only 350 miles since the last fill up. It was a good thing we stopped otherwise, we would have been walking to a gas station. I lost between 20–30% of fuel efficiency.
Aside: I really want a small plug-in hybrid truck. That means, I want the drive-train to be electric motors with a gas generator to charge the batteries as needed. However, all the hybrids seem to be gas engines with battery boost and still only getting 30–32 mpg. The 2025 “Ramcharger” seems to be the most similar to what I want but it is really big and really expensive. I want a small truck that can occasionally tow a trailer with a 5000lb load like a fishing boat, lumber, pop-up camper, or a two-wheeled tractor. Let me know when they become available.
Taking Stock
When we got back home and tried unloading the tractor, I noted it was really hard to steer. The operator videos showed that the split differential should allow you to use a brake on one side to turn it like a tank and do a 180 rotation, but I could only turn right and not left. With manual effort I lifted and twisted the tractor into the orientation I wanted and drove it to a place in the barn. I started having concerns and reservations. WTF did I buy?
The seller didn’t know exactly what everything was because it was his son’s who had tragically passed. The tractor had been sitting for a couple of years. I knew what the flair mower and the plastic mulch layer were for, but I wasn’t sure of the other items. There were some heavy metal plates and I had no idea what those went to. The earthtools guy helped out when I stumbled across a video.
I learned that I have a ridger (that is not a plow) and a dozer/scraper. The video helped show that those black metal plates get mounted to the dozer/scraper to help keep the material that you’re moving from slipping out the sides. Another helpful tip is that you can ‘easily’ swap (a.k.a. nearly rupture a disc in your spine from lifting) from scraper to dozer by pivoting around the center pin.
Maintenance Time
It is important to know when you know nothing. I did the thing that most people don’t do: RTFM. If you don’t RTFM, you should. If you don’t know what RTFM means, you should look it up.
I started off easy by doing an oil change on the Honda GTX-390 engine. The oil came out black as night. Uh oh. The manual states the the transmission fluid filter should be changed after the initial 30 hours of operation. Note that there is a usage timer installed… “does that say 600 hours on it? Uh oh.” You can see on the transmission fluid filter ‘30 hrs’. The filters are non-standard and have the Ferrari name attached to them. The order for two new filters should be here in a week. That is when the transmission fluid will be changed.
Getting back to the challenging steering, I rewatched videos of operating the tractor and I had all the ideas right. There was a mystery on why the tractor was not turning correctly. Fortunately for me, that same earthtools stud on YouTube came through for me on the brake maintenance procedure. Everything he mentioned that could go wrong was wrong on the brakes. The brake drum was fused/rusted and a lot of penetrating oil and dead-blow hammering was needed to break it free. That took almost an hour and I went back to the reference material to make sure I was doing it correctly. The pads were burnished smooth and needed to be scuffed up. The brake lever was stuck. The brake was fully disassembled to extract the cover that holds the brake lever. It took another 40 minutes of hammering and penetrating oil to get that brake level unstuck. Finally, the cables themselves were too tight and were always ‘on’. Turns out all the bicycle mechanic practice tuning cable brakes and shifters came in useful for this project too.
The worst part of all this maintenance was the freaking mosquitoes that got in the barn. They were in my face, landing on my arms, and buzzing my ears and making the process enraging (and itchy!). Reaching my limit, I recalled I have a barn fan in the house that I bought specifically for keeping me cool while riding my indoor bike trainer. That fan was cranked up to 11 and the mosquitoes could not handle the gale force winds now blowing through my hair like I was in a Bay Watch promo.
There is one good to say about all these maintenance tasks: no special tools were needed and all parts easily accessible. Metric socket sets and wrenches are all that are needed. The brake went back together easily enough (except for those $!@$%#@ springs). The best part is now that the brake lever was unfrozen, I can easily turn the tractor just by pushing it around in neutral! The other brake was also burnished and needed some TLC, but not nearly as much. I did have one little issue with the right brake… the tractor fell off the stands as I was jacking it up with a giant loud crash! That was loud and upsetting but that is what those nice bars are for to prevent dumb people from damaging their new tools. After that fall, I built a wood stand that would hold the tractor mostly level and is hopefully more stable and less ‘crashy’. I totally get how farmers die each year from accidents working on machinery.
One nagging concern is that the carburetor is varnished with old gas. My next maintenance was to remove all the old gas from the tank. Not wanting to take the old fuel to a hazardous waste disposal, I’m going to try the dilution method where you mix 2/3 new gas to 1/3 old gas. The siphon worked well removing the old fuel and mixed with new was put into the oldest car we have to burn up.
Aside: Part of engine maintenance is making sure your gas doesn’t get “old” (sitting for over 3 months) by either using it or adding a gas stabilizer like StaBil. I also have a generator that needs the same treatment (and all the other engines around the property like the chipper and weed whacker). Part of the reason for this tractor is that I should only have to service one engine for the mower, tiller, snowblower, chipper, wood splitter, etc. I recently learned, that you need to run your generator monthly under load otherwise a magnetic component fails and you can no longer generate power. If you have a fuel shutoff, shut the valve and let all the fuel be used up from the carburetor by waiting until the engine stalls out.
The final maintenance task accomplished was adjusting the flail mower. This was pretty straightforward, I took the casing off and checked the belts and it looked good. Lubricated the mower height adjustment screw as it looked a little rusty. The only major thing was that the wheels have two positions ‘up’ for storage and ‘down’ for usage. The wheels did not go up. It only took a moment to figure out that all the bolts were over-tightened which did not allow it to pivot. After loosening the bolts and adding a little silicon lubricant everything is working as stated in the manual.
You’re all caught up on my project! There are a few more maintenance tasks to accomplish before demonstrating the flail mower.
- Change the transmission fluid (waiting on filters to be delivered!)
- Grease the front wheels of the mower
- Change the gear oil in the mower.
If you read this far, you’re pretty awesome and you’re probably my mom or wife. You’re loved and thank you for reading. Continue on to part 2!
