When a simple test drive isn't good enough

Last week, Scott Hollister and I were part of a group of writers and editors invited to a media day at The Toro Co.'s headquarters in the Minneapolis suburb of Bloomington, Minn.

Although the event included some interesting presentations about the company's products, the highlight of the day for the tech-head in me was the tour of Toro's testing facility. For the first time, I was going to get an inside look at how the company makes sure its products live up to the expectations of the users.

Toro makes everything from multi-gang fairway mowers that cost tens of thousands of dollars, to electric leaf blowers for the homeowner, and it all has to be tested. For that, the center employs almost 50 technicians.

That happens in one of the 54 cells in Toro's test center, which range in size from a massive hemi-anechoic chamber (pictured here — the blurry photo is Hollister's fault) to a small room with about a dozen electric leaf blowers being run to failure. The leaf blowers, by the way, are being monitored by a technician, and each of them has its own fire extinguisher ready in case failure includes smoke and fire.

The anechoic chamber is used to test equipment for compliance with noise control regulations, and its design allows technicians to pinpoint the location of sounds from a piece of equipment as they work to reduce sound output.

Among the other interesting and sometimes amazing test cells were a pair of drum dynamometers that can be used to load the drive train of a piece of equipment, or they can be powered to drive the wheels of the equipment.

In one cell, the technicians had set up a multi-blade rotary deck with its front wheels were riding on on a drum that reproduced the bumps a deck would see in mowing rough terrain. Its lift system was set up to raise and lower the deck every minute or so, subjecting it to more abuse than it would see in a year of commercial mowing.

Down the hall, Toro has a tilt bed that's used to test the incline stability of its mowers. According to the company, the testing requirements are different in the U.S. and Europe, which doubles the amount of time it takes to run them.

This station also revealed a bit of grass-cutting trivia. There was a bin in the corner that was full of what appeared to be tennis balls. I asked about them, and learned that they replicate the density of wet grass clippings, so the technicians use them to fill the grass catchers during the tests.

In another cell, they have a fixture in the floor that lets them inject a one-inch steel bar into the deck of a rotary mower running at full power. As you might expect, it brings the mower to a quick and noisy stop.  As if that's not enough, they run the test several more times to ensure the strength and durability of their decks, blades and spindles.

Even more spectacular is the thrown objects test. Here, the technicians feed hundreds of 1/4- and 1/2-inch steel balls into the mower housing to test how well the decks control the ejection. The cells where this is done are pock marked on all the walls, doors, shelves, etc. But it's comforting to know that when I step behind a rotary mower, someone has taken the time to run these tests.

Much quieter, but equally valuable, is the cell where huge hydraulic cylinders are testing a shock absorber and mower hood gas piston. There's also new wheel design bolted to the floor with a cylinder flexing its center disk to test the durability.

From the mundane to the spectacular, the Toro test facility is working 24 hours a day, seven days a week, giving the company's equipment a thorough workout. And even when no one is around, there are web cameras that allow technicians to check on the tests remotely.