Phoenix T-4 Series, 48" Tiller

Hi. I'm Ted, from EverythingAttachments.com. We're going to show you the Phoenix Rotary Tiller, part of our Gardening Series. This is made by Sigma, in Italy; it's one of the finest companies making tillers right now. There are very few made in America, even the Bush Hog brand is made by Sigma, so are many of the OEM tractor dealership companies, made by this company right here. Sigma builds them for Kioti, Montana, and a lot of other companies. Some of the finest ones are built by Sigma; in fact, this is the best one I know of.

Come around to this side and I'm going to show you some of the best features. All the Sigma tillers distributed by Unifarm come with a slip clutch. If you hit a rock or a stump, instead of shearing a bolt and you having to come back here and work on it, you're simply going to slip this clutch. When the rock gets cleared, the stump, or whatever it was that would have sheared the bolt, then this clutch will go back to working and won't have to replace the bolt in your shear system. That's a big advantage.

Also on the system here, it has a very large diameter torque tube compared to some of the cheaper ones. It also comes with 6 blades per rotor instead of 4; 4 is pretty much the common number that everybody uses. With this large torque tube, it isn't going to flex on here; and 6 blades per rotor, this is pretty much top-of-the-line. Also, one of the best features that none of the other tillers have, there are 6 bolts at the end of the shafts. You can unbolt this whole assembly and take it out to work on it, so you're not having to change your tines up under the tiller.

Also, where your lift arms hook, it's fully adjustable. You just simple loosen these 2 nuts; you can slide it back and forth. Even for a subcompact tractor that has a narrow hitch, you can bring these in. In this case, we're going to be using a 32-horsepower Kubota. Really, it should have probably a 60 or 66 inch tiller behind it. This is a 56 inch, so it's not going to clear the complete tracks.

What you would do to clear, because you don't want a hard spot left in your garden, so what you would do is you would run one lift arm out a little further and one lift arm in as far as you can, and let either side, depending on how you adjust it, extend past the side of your tractor. That way you always keep a clear path of soft dirt and you don't have any hard spots in garden.

You've got a separate contained gear box up here with its own oil. You've got size 80 chain over here in the side over here, with a sight glass, so you can make sure that it's got oil in it. When you go out to it in the spring, you simply look for the oil, you're good to go. It has this stand here. Basically, this is a big wheel, and when you unhook it, it's going to want to roll forward. That's why you've got your kickstand here, so you can hold it up without needing two people to hook this up.

In adjusting your depth, you've got several holes here; these are your skids. Right now, we've got it adjusted in its lowest cutting position. We would put it to one of these other holes to make it cut further. We're going to leave it in its highest position now, and probably just make two passes. On the second pass, once the ground is soft, it will let this bury up enough that we'll still be getting a good 6 or 7 inches of tilling room.

When you're hooking up your tiller to your tractor, one of the things you have to be sure of, a tiller's one of the things that surely has a short PTO shaft. What you want to do is make sure that you've got room to clear the shaft here, because if you put this tiller on and it's all the way up, and you have room to go on, when it gets down to level, it's going to be at shortest point. There is a chance that if you put it on while it was all the way up, just because it fit when it was all the way up, when it comes down, the shaft can be too long and end up braking your cross joints and/or other damage. You want to check it with your shaft level and make sure that you've got room between this before you put it on. Push your button in all the way, slide it up on, let your button out, and then pull back on it slowly until the button catches. You want to make sure you hook your safety chains up. This is just to keep trash, debris, grass, or you, from getting wrapped up in the shaft.

Now after we've hooked our safety chains, we've got our PTO shaft hooked; we're going to hook up our top link. We're going to adjust this level. The tiller's sitting pretty level now. We're going to remove our kickstand which keeps it from turning; we're going to put it in its raised position. Now we're ready to go.

This tiller is almost the width of the tractor, and if we were doing it for the final time for the year and going to really do it for right now, for our gardening, we would move these brackets where your lift arms are held to one side to clear the complete track of the tractor so we don't have any hard areas. For now it will be fine.

This is also a way of controlling how fine the ground is that comes out. If you want your ground to be not quite as fine, leave this up. It's going to let the chunks come out without just completely pulverizing it. If you want a smoother ground, easier to plant in, then leave this down all the way. I'm going to leave it up 1 notch just for now.

We just got through using a disc harrow. The ground is broken up pretty good, but to really make easy planting and everything work better, we're going to use a rototiller.

It's nice to have your ground where it looks as fine as sand, and it really does make it easy to plant, but the only thing about this red clay is that the finer you get it, after it rains, the harder it gets like concrete. Somewhere in there, there's a happy medium between getting the clods out and not getting it too fine.

I lowered the tailgate on this unit just a little bit to make it just a little bit finer. You can see the difference in the first row we did and the second row, just from simply changing that chain. The slides are adjusted in its position to where it's going to be cutting the least amount. We actually probably should come up one more notch on the slides to let it go a little deeper, but as the dirt gets softer, it will go deeper in the ground anyway.

One of the best things about the Sigma tiller is that with 6 blades per rotor, it's only gaining half the amount of wear as if it only had 4, so you're going to go a lot longer before you have to do any changing of the tines. It has a very wide blade from the front to the back, and that's what give you your wearing time. It's not how long the tine is, it's how wide it is from front to back, and how thick it is.

One of the things you're going to notice while he's using that tiller is all of the big clumps and everything that you heard on the first pass that he made is pretty much gone now, after just one pass. You hear a few things hitting, but to start with, it sounded like bombs going off. He's just going to come up one side and go down the other. The ground now is starting to take shape and soften up, and it's just about ready to where you could plant.

Less than 2 hours ago, this was just hard red clay with grass on it. Now after 2 passes, what you've got is we've plowed it, we disked it, which we wouldn't have had to have done, but we did it since we had it here. We've made 2 passes with the tiller with it, so now all our nice, hard, big clods and everything have gone to some pretty good ground. We've got a few small pieces in it, which you need. Over the winter, this is going to break up and just get better and better every year that this is done.

We're going to take bedder tomorrow, make our hilling, and then make our furrow to where you would be planting. This is soft enough now you can plant by hand, and it's going to make it a whole lot easier. If you wanted to blend in your compost, fertilizer, anything, now would be the time to do it before you made your second pass over it with the tiller. It's ready to be planted. We're going to show how to use some other attachments tomorrow in gardening, but when you get this hard red clay to where you can do that, 6 to 8 inches deep, you're ready to go gardening.

Video 2

Hi. I'm Ted from Everything Attachments. We're here today with the Phoenix T4 rotary tiller. This is made by the Sigma Corporation, in Italy. It's the finest tiller out of all that I've seen in just the way it's constructed, the different features it offers, and the beautiful powder-coat paint that they put on them.

This particular one has a clevis-style hitch, which is going to make it very easy to hookup for the smaller subcompact tractors, like a 2305 John Deere, a BX series Kubota, TZ Tractor of New Holland. All of those are going to have the stabilizers coming to the center. That way if your pin is here, you're not going to have to loosen up all of your stabilizers to be able to get your bars over the pin. You simply put them between the center; slide the pin in. It will still work great if your stabilizers go to the outside, but it's a huge convenience if they go to the middle.

This unit has 6 blades per rotor, has a very wide blade from front-to-back, and that's your wearing distance. With 6 blades instead of 4, it leaves a really good consistency with your dirt, ready for planting. This comes with a high-quality Eurocardan driveshaft, has the slip clutch on it. If you hit a large rock or get a piece of wood or something you didn't know was in the garden stuck in there or it hit something, it will let that clutch slip instead of having to use . . . what would normally be on some of the tillers is just a round shaft here, with a bolt going through it. When it hits something, it shears that bolt. The only thing is, you have to get off and replace that bolt and do the repair usually when it's hot, and have extra bolts with you. This way, it just slips, and then continues to work as you get the debris out or it goes over it. Let's go over here to the side.

When this tiller comes to you, this A-frame will not be on it; that's one of the few things you'll have to do. You'll have to install your A-frame, install your driveshaft. These will come in the up position, and we'll need to put the clevis hitches down. Also on the length of your driveshaft, this comes with a fairly short shaft, but it could go on a large tractor. They leave them a little bit longer just in case you have a larger tractor. Go to our 'How to Measure and Cut' video and learn how to cut this shaft if you need to. Remember to have your tiller sitting in a straight position before you measure it, because this is like a big wheel. If you don't have your kickstand right, you could be leaning way far forward or way back. That's going to affect the length of your drive shaft when you're measuring it to cut it. Come on over to the side.

It does have a grease fitting here on this side. It has a thick slide here on it, and that's what's going to control how deep this is tilling. It has 4 different adjustment holes. Come on around to the back.

All of the Sigma tillers are shipped with the oil already in the center gearbox and the side drive box, but do check them and make sure. The side box has a sight glass on it that you'll be able to see that the oil's in there. The rear tailgate here is adjustable with a chain in this slot. Between the groundspeed on your tractor and the tailgate setting, is going to control the consistency of the dirt going through this. You don't want to get it too fine depending on what area you're in because it'll make it get hard after it rains. Come around to this side, Peanut.

Over here on the drive-side, it has a heavy-duty chain running in oil with a self-tensioner inside of here, a vent at the top to let out the pressure as the oil gets warmer. It has a nice shield over here. As you're dragging this through the dirt, it's not wearing on this case that's containing your oil. This side is also adjustable for your height.

Overall, the Sigma-brand tiller is considered Number 1 as far as I'm concerned. If you'll give us a call or an email, we'll be happy to help size this properly for your tractor and your need.