Hi,
I inherited a 2012 5045E. It's a great low hour tractor. I want to buy a Woods batwing. It requires 34hp at the PTO. This tractor produces 37hp at the PTO. I know enough to know that it won't work pulling up hills where I live (unless I crawl).
I wonder if anyone has had success tuning it to increase the HP? I think an extra 15hp would work.
The 2012 5045E uses a mechanically injected turbocharged 2.9 L 3 cylinder engine. The parts lists have about a dozen different listings for "engine" so it is unclear if there are any differences in parts for your year 5045E vs. 5055E, 5065E, 5075E or if the performance increases are simply by increasing the fueling rate as set by a screw on the injector pump or with turbocharger wastegate settings, if equipped. It is unclear if there is a wastegate on a Tier II 5045E's turbocharger, I did not see one listed separately from the turbo as they do with later models, and if there is in fact one integrated with the turbocharger, one could only guess if it is adjustable.
The best guesstimate is that the 5045E, being a nominally 50 HP rated engine, actually makes around 44-45 HP at the PTO than the 37 that it is officially rated at. Nebraska didn't test that year of tractor but they tested the predecessor, the later 5103, which was rated at 50 HP and had a similar if not identical engine setup to the 2012 5045E. It made 44 HP at the PTO at rated PTO speed and 46 peak PTO HP, which is about what you would assume for a 50 HP rated engine as driveline losses are generally <10% for a modern tractor. Deere has been known to significantly underrate the PTO horsepower on the later turbocharged 3 cylinder tractors as evidenced by the universally noticeably higher than rated PTO power numbers on the models that Nebraska did test.
A batwing weighs in two ton range, and it's on wheels, which should not be that big of a deal for a 5045E to physically pull up hills that are safe to operate the batwing on. The real work is in spinning the blades, which can take a lot of power. How much power you need depends on the size of batwing, what you are cutting, and how fast you want to cut it. The general rule of thumb is 5 engine HP per foot of cutter for "average" work, around 7 HP/foot for head-high brambles, and 3-4 engine HP per foot for light duty work like pasture clipping the sparse clumps of weeds that the cattle didn't eat. Also realize that rotary cutters need to dwell over a spot for long enough to suck up and shred the debris and then spit it out, or they do a rotten job. You will either just knock material and drive over it, leaving it largely uncut or you will plug up the mower as you are feeding material into it faster than it can spit it out. How fast you can go is directly correlated with how much material you are running through the cutter but in general you can't exceed about 5 MPH in even light conditions.
