General Information About Sickle Mowers, or as some people call them "Sickle Bar Mowers"
The sickle bar mower was one of the first mechanical mowers for mowing and many of these are still in use today. Typically they are used on fairly small farms.
These mowers are sometimes referred to as reciprocating sickle mowers because the cutting bars move back and forth against each other. The cutting bars usually had five cutting blades and each of the blades was about seven inches long.
Small by todays standards, these had a cutting swath of between five and seven feet.
As with a lot of things they had their advantages and they have their disadvantages too.
Because of the way the bars move against one another, the sickle mowers are easy to clog when cutting thick stalks of vegetation, like grass or hay. Also, if the hay or vegetation is not standing up fairly straight, these cutters are not very efficient.
As mentioned above, they will only cut a swath up to about seven feet.
Some sickle mowers are equipped with a reel on the front of them that lifts up hay or vegetation that is bent over. By straightening up the stalks, the cutting efficiency is greatly improved. The addition of the front reel is commonly known as a 'sickle haybine". Some of these also include a device that is designed to 'open' the hay stems to allow for much faster drying.
The sickle haybine was much faster than the old sickle bar mowers so it was better adapted to use in commercial application too.
These old sickle mowers can still be found in use today on smaller farms. These mowers require less horsepower than the newer type of rotary mowers. Also a sickle mower can actually mow under a fence line (between the fence posts), something a rotary mower simply cannot do.
