My Love/Hate Relationship With a Sickle Mower

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I've been around a sickle mower for a lot of years. Growing up on an apple orchard, we would hook it up every fall and mow under the apple trees just prior to harvest, so the pickers weren't wading through tall grass. My earliest memories were that the stupid thing was always a struggle to get on the tractor.

If it's stored on the ground, you're worried about it tipping over and possibly decapitating you. We stored it in the back of a machine shed and I remember backing the tractor up and then having to scoot it across the concrete floor to get it lined up with the tractor. Then, once you got the lower three point arms hooked up you have a frame that had to be extended that mounted where the top link usually goes, then there were a couple of over-center devices that had to be locked in place and then the top link would go back in to connect the part that was hooked to the tractor to the back of the frame of the sickle mower. That's what you used to adjust the angle of the cut. Then you hooked up the PTO, which was fairly hard to reach with all the other mounting hardware in place.

Then it was time to grease it. A sickle mower has about 100 grease zerks, or at least it seems that way, and many of them are a little tough to get to, and if you want the thing to last you'd better keep it greased. Finally, we'd take a paint brush and some waste oil and thoroughly coat the cutterbar. The whole process could take a couple of hours and you'd be worn out by the time you were through.

That's why we so much preferred a brush hog. We had a pull type brush hog and you just backed up to it, dropped in a hitch pin, hooked up the PTO and you were cutting. So, it was the preferred machine for making tall grass (and brush) short.

There are certain areas, you just can't get with a brush hog, though. Pond banks, under trees, and the ditch by my driveway may be impossible to get to with a rotary cutter, and a sickle mower cuts it with no problem.

I let the ditch by my long driveway get away from me this year. The driveway's on one side, then a wooly ditch with brush 4' tall, and a nice mowed area the other side. I could have taken a weedeater and knocked it down, but that's more work than this old man wants to do, so I hooked the old farm sickle mower up to my small tractor and cut it that way.

The sickle mower was tough to hook to the 60 hp utility tractor on the farm, it was danged near impossible to hook to my TC40. There's just not enough room on a compact for all that goofy mechanism that hooks the mower to the tractor to fit, and the lift arms aren't really long enough. I had to move the lift links into a different position on the lower three point arms to even get the mower to function. Then, the PTO wouldn't go on because of some surface rust in the grooves. After about three hours and a little anger management, I finally had the mower on the tractor. I went down my ditch three passes and it looks AMAZING! It was almost worth the stress of hooking up.

I think I can modify the mower slightly and make it work better on the tractor. Those arms that contact the three point could be shortened about six inches and a couple of roll pins moved to a different location and I think attaching it to the tractor would be a breeze. I need to get an owner's manual and make sure I'm not missing something, and consult a former co-worker who is a sickle mower expert before doing anything. It looks to me like a pretty minor modification will make it work just fine.

The bottom line on sickle mowers, if you think you want one to do something similar to what I did in the video, beware. Good ones are getting fairly rare and are, in my opinion, overpriced. You'll have to do a fair amount of maintenance to keep them running, including hitting all of those grease fittings. I'd recommend building a cart with wheels to store it inside on a concrete floor. It's not a brush hog, if you try to cut trees with it you'll shorten the life of the sickle. Finally, it can be a real slow way to cut hay if that's what you're buying it for. In heavy conditions the hay will "slug up" on the cutter bar and you have to back up and clean it out before moving forward again. In really heavy conditions it can take all day to mow five acres and you may suffer a heart attack in the middle of it, it's that frustrating.

But, if you lack ream remote hydraulics on the back of your tractor and you want to cut hay, or if you have a pond bank or ditch you can't cut with anything else, a sickle mower is your answer.

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