OutdoorKing Repair Forum Forums Repairs and Maintenance Questions On Ride On Mowers Questions on Greenfield Ride On Mower Frames Modify Evolution park/ emergency brake to foot brake.

As per the title,

I live on a steep block parts of which are 16 deg, Thinking of adding a pedal and some linkages to use the parking/emergency brake as a foot break, for added piece of mind when heading downhill..

I believe the later models had this feature and was wondering if apart from replacing pads and discs more often can you think of any issues?

Cheers,

Phil.

Hi Phil,
I fitted a hydraulic disc brake to one a few years ago so it could be used on hilly ground. If I was to do another one I would use a cable operated one, there was a lot of work in getting the hydraulic one fitted, mostly because of the caliper size and fitting it in the wheel diameter. The one I did was on a Stalion might be a bit more room on an Evo, not sure. I got my bits from Byglo here in Dandenong, have a look on their ebay site.

Greenfields and Hills are never a good mix in my opinion. Don't get me wrong, they will do it well, just not as safe as something with a hydrostatic drive for example. There is the story somewhere of a kid actually being killed by a greenfield that took off down a hill after the chain broke, it was an old tractor model with no brakes at all though.

I'm quite sure anything is possible, From memory the evolution has a disk brake anyway, and I'm pretty sure what you are describing is all greenfield actually did. I don't think you would wear through a disk but pads might be fairly common

Hi Phil,

I'm a bit late to reply, you may already have this figured out, but I'll post what I know:

Here is a screenshot out of one of the parts diagrams for a recent Evolution/Fastcut model:


Also here is the brake pedal setup on mine which shows how the linkages go together a bit more clearly:


As you can see there, they just added the foot pedal alongside the handbrake lever, acting on the same disc brake. There is a long linkage in parallel with the handbrake linkage, running to the front of the chassis where there's a foot pedal attached. So adding the foot pedal should be quite doable if you can make/get the pedal and linkages.

There are actually several different generations - the slightly older ones like mine (2009) just had the foot pedal controlling the disc brake, and a separate handbrake that latches into some stops welded to the rear sprocket. More recently (maybe 2015?) they got rid of that and just had both the handbrake and foot brake use the same disc brake as I mentioned above.

You can replace the pads with any generic ones that fit, so replacements are not too hard to get hold of. Just make sure the brake disc (part 3 in the diagram) isn't coming loose from the axle - if yours is rusted up like most are, it should be fine, but after I cleaned the rust out of mine I had an issue where the brake disc became slightly loose on the axle, thus rocking back and forth and wearing out the key (part 4 in the diagram) that holds it on the axle. I had to put grub screws through the collar of the disc to fix that.

Also, if you have a model with a lockable differential and it is unlocked, the handbrake/foot brake will only act on one wheel (the right hand side one)!


RLP

This is the case - https://www.courts.qld.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0007/184732/cif-garrett-pratt-jm-20130531.pdf