945/55 MoCo cutter bar timing and blades.

I just pulled a mower out of the shop today, that I bought as a
project and quickly saw that I needed to go through the cutter
bar modules. I had to replace a couple castings and a couple
gears. Replaced and few bearings and all new seals, after
cleaning everything up. All the timing marks are correct on
the shear hubs, and all the units were put together 90* from
one another. Where I went off book, was where I decided to
use Kuhn straight blades without a degree of twist. I run this
type on my Kuhn machine to help guard against stone
damage. Deere didn't offer the flat blade, but I noticed the
Kuhn blade was the same, just without the twist. The issue is
the blades are tipping at 45*. It appears that if I put the Deere
twisted blades on, that the leading edge of the one blade will
clear the underside of the lifted edge of the other. This
sounds a real stretch to me that it could have been built with
tolerances that close. The Kuhn had no issues when I
switched to flat blades. This bar is set up to rotate toward the
center. If they want to tip at 45, I don't see how they could be
set any farther apart by adjusting the timing of the pinion
gears. FYI the flat blades measured the exact same length as
the twisted blades. The service manual didn't talk about
timing between modules, as long as they would mount the
turtle shells 90* from each other. Is there something I am
missing? I was really hoping that I could run the flat blades
on both machines.

How have you got the rotation set???? You can put the bearing holder in two ways to make it CW or CCW rotation. The holder is an eccentric so it would make the distance different.

You can set it to were they all rotate toward the center or you can have them rotating is sets of CW and CCW. You have to watch this as you can have things hitting each other.

It is set up in the 1-5 CW and 6-9 CCW. 5 and 6 clear the tips better than any of the rest. This is the first one running this pattern that I have worked on.

5 and 6 would clear more because of how they would be spread out against the drive gears. So they would be further apart.

I adjusted the timing between of one unit and then switched to opposing pattern except for the outside two on each end. Put the twisted blades back on and everything clears. the odd number of turtle shells makes it hard to decide what to to with the center one. Do you turn it CW or CCW. Anyway, turning nice and smooth now. Found one universal joint that needs to be replaced and a couple bushings in the header lift, and it should be ready to go.

(quoted from post at 07:07:38 02/15/17) I adjusted the timing between of one unit and then switched to opposing pattern except for the outside two on each end. Put the twisted blades back on and everything clears. the odd number of turtle shells makes it hard to decide what to to with the center one. Do you turn it CW or CCW. Anyway, turning nice and smooth now. Found one universal joint that needs to be replaced and a couple bushings in the header lift, and it should be ready to go.

Click to expand...

Craig the center one really does not make any difference which way it turns. You are going to have two next to each other rotating the same direction. By the way I prefer the alternating pattern over the center merging one. I think you get a better flow through the conditioner with the crop spread out.

IF you have an impeller conditioner machine you will notice that the flails have a different pattern where the rotation of the turtles throws the hay. So some of them you have to use center rotation to get the best conditioning.