Sickle mowers

Glenn D

Member
I have within easy reach (free or close o free) 2 kinds of sickle mower. one is a new idea 251. it has it's own wheels but it's not the kind with the hydraulic hook up I've seen elsewhere. it has a wooden pitman arm. I was told it has problems and it looks like it's missing some teeth and some of the others are chipped. can these be gotten easily as replacements?

The other is a Dearborn (pretty sure it is) I haven't gotten it out of the weeds but it's likely seized from sitting but was said to be working when parked. The brackets for it were on the 9n Tractor I got so I'm pretty sure it's complete

I'm pretty sure I can get these working but was wondering which would be better to put some effort into?
 
If you can get them rel cheap I would get both. Never hurts to have a back up when you have equipment. Either one may well be pretty easy to fix or may not depending on many factors. Over the years I have picked up a good many sickle bar mowers and brought them back to life. I have even built good working ones from parts of 2 or more and some came out real good like the one I built to fit a Farmall B using parts from a ford and an A/C mower and mounted it under the belly and used a power steering pump for the hyds on it.
As for parts yep pretty easy to find section and all just look for a letter stamped on the old section and buy section of that letter. As for which is better the 3 point one will be more angle and can go into tighter places.
By the way if I where you I would switch which ever one you get over to the new section bolts and get rid of the rivets
 
myself, I'd take the dearborn. We have the 7 foot
model (can't remember #) the farmer we rent
hunting property from gave us a 5 gal bucket full
of old blade teeth from his combine for it and she
cuts the ditches around camp with ease. I've seen
it cut through saplings that were 1" thick. will
say though it is a real pain in the @#$ to mount
it when we need it. we have 3 N's we use to mow
the ditches, perimeter, and woods trails of about
600 acres that we lease for hunting. takes us
about 2 to 3 days to cut mowing all day.
 
That's a lot of work and am glad to hear the N's are up to it. I was thinking these might be more maintenance per job that they are worth but maybe not because like the tractors they seem pretty simple. I was over at a friends scrap business earlier. he has a bar rake and a seed planter for me that his dad used years ago and he said he gets sickle mowers all the time and will put all the ones aside that he gets for me.

He also has another tractor for me if I want it . it might be enough to work better with the baler than my N's. it has a better loader than my freeman too. Not really sure what it is, he said International ... t's marked McCormick so I guess they are the same company. it's diesel though and hopefully more HP than my N's it looks like live hydraulics too.

Anybody recognize this?


mvphoto19195.jpg
 
If your going to use it behind a N tractor get the Dearborn. The drive pulleys on it are sized for a tractor with ground speed pto. The new idea is probably made for one with live pto but without knowing exactly what model it is we can"t be sure. I had a Ford 515 sickle mower and the drive pulleys were sized for a live pto tractor. It didn"t work well at all run on ground pto speed. Ford used to offer alternate size pulleys to run them on tractors with ground pto so it might be possible that New Idea did also but you would probably not be able to find them.
 
Be extremely careful working on sickle mowers ,
keep your fingers away from the blades even when
the sickle mower is NOT hooked to the tractor ,
they will slice your finger off in a New York
Minute.

Stan
9N 222933
2N with 8N motor 8N345567
8N 146710
8N 179555
8N 197904
8N 199000
8N 254079
8N 362039
 

I can certainly see how that could be the case. if something got stuck there could be enough stored up energy like a spring to make those cutters move suddenly
 

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