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Home-Built Brush Mower Cuts With Sickle Sections
When he needed a really tough power mower for cutting brush and weeds, Daniel Krenzel, Cullman, Alabama, went to the shop, not the store.
He started with an old push rotary mower with a 3 1/2-hp gas engine. The first step was to cut off the front of the deck with a Sawz-All, so the front inch of the blade ru
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Home-Built Brush Mower Cuts With Sickle Sections FARM HOME Lawn Mowers (31h,38) 27-4-34 When he needed a really tough power mower for cutting brush and weeds, Daniel Krenzel, Cullman, Alabama, went to the shop, not the store.
He started with an old push rotary mower with a 3 1/2-hp gas engine. The first step was to cut off the front of the deck with a Sawz-All, so the front inch of the blade runs in the open.
Then he replaced the contoured mower blade with a flat one of his own making that relies on sickle mower knife sections to do the cutting.
To make the blade, he started with a 2 1/2-in.wide by 5/16-in. thick bar of cold rolled steel. He drilled holes at each end of the bar to match holes in sickle sections, so he could bolt, not rivet, the sections to the bar.
"I used 1/4-in. bolts to mount the sections," he says. "On the leading edge of the section, I used a no. 8 hardness bolt and on the other side, I used a softer no. 2 bolt. That way, if I hit something hard there's a shear bolt that allows it to give, but the harder bolt will keep the section from flying off."
At one end he put the sickle section on top of the blade and at the other end he put it on the bottom. Once he had the sections mounted, he sharpened them and balanced the blade. He says it weighs about the same as the original mower blade.
"With the front of the deck cut off, I can push the blade right into tall grass, weeds or small brush without bending it over. I used serrated sickle sections because they cut more aggressively. It cuts off cleaner and quicker than if I had to push the mower over the top," he says. "Because the blade is flat, there's no extra air movement to throw the material, nor does it create a vacuum that pulls material up."
Krenzel says safety with a machine like this could be a problem. He only runs the engine at about 1/3 of top rpm's and has never needed more speed to cut even the toughest brush.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Daniel Krenzel, 510 Elizabeth St. N.E., Cullman, Alabama 35055 (ph 256 739-5241).
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