479 HAYBINE

Last year while cutting hay. we had problems with hay getting caught in sickle bar. Would have to back up then hay would then go through the rolls.The Hay was Fine June Grass. When we would get into some thicker stemmed hay seemed to work fine. Pulled out sickle bar and all sections were tight and still had serated teeth. Was thinking about changing teeth on reel.
Any ideas would be appreciated.

Guards may be worn. Ben

Check the guards and maybe slow down. Grass can be a tough go. Good Luck.

Junegrass is miserable stuff to cut. Dull guards, poor knife/guard contact, dull knives all contribute.

Sometimes finer grasses require waiting an extra day or until later in the hot part of the day for the grass to dry and stiffen up a bit. As was said, dull sections or guard ledgers can cause problems and so can going too fast. Cutting a bit higher might help but not always.

Fine or damp grass is where disc mowers shine.

Make sure the knifes are down on the ledger plate so grass is not getting under them. There may be some reel position and speed settings that can help too - which the manual would explain better than I could attempt as I don't fully understand that aspect of a mower conditioner.

My MF32 sickle bar mower (working from memory) if I recall correctly, for grasses - no stems may have said non-serrated knifes on non-serrated ledgers. I'm thinking that the fine grass might not get cut with serrated blades, but pulled into the guard via the serrations.

I've been very surprised as to how well my MF32 sickle mower cuts and my Hesston 1110 sickle mower conditioner is even better. We will probably be making some mixed grass 2nd and 3rd cuttings with the Hesston this year on a field we are recovering. We've been cutting Timothy and before that Orchard grass/fescue/native mix. The stems cut very well with a sickle. Now that I think of it, we cut some Teff with the Hesston last year and it seemed to do OK too. It has smooth ledgers and serrated knifes.

Other things that might help are height of cut - we cut as high as the moco will go and bypass a lot of thatch doing so that could clog the cutterbar. Run full out 540 PTO rpms and work our way up in speed until it looks like clogging is a problem or the cut gets ragged.

More than anything, I think sharp knifes, ledgers with a nice 90 degree square corner and the knifes down on the ledgers make these sickle mower conditioners work great.

YMMV

Good luck,
Bill

Pull the knife bar and sharpen each section. Then, before you put it back in, make sure there is no dirt or old grass in the grove of each rock guard the knife slides into. I found the junk in between caused a gap between knives and guard cutting edge. I would sharpen the knife about every 8 acres and clean out the groove.