Home-built 18 1/2 foot rotary mower.

[bcp]

Must have been in the old pre-safety-police days.

Bruce

 

[lpigott]

Awesome!

 

[jaxs]

That suca should tighten the driver's (and anyone else within 1/2 mile) puckering string. I actually seen several like that in use many years ago. Mostly knocking down cotton and corn stalks. An added element of danger was that few tractors had live pto and over-running clutch's were unheard of.

 

[RobS]

Looks to me like it's ground driven, no PTO at all...

 

[jaxs]

Looks to me like it's ground driven, no PTO at all...

That's correct but all those wirling blades would drive the mower tires and push older tractor forward several feet after clutch is pushed down. Real eye opener if tractor is aimed toward a building,fence or your truck when you try and stop.

 

[TerryR]

We had a factory-built rotary mower on the farm around 1960 that we used to cut down cornstalks with a Farmall H. It came with a metal shield that mounted behind the operator to protect from flying debris. It left a hole maybe a foot by two feet between the back of the tractor deck and the bottom of the shield, so we hung a gunny sack there to catch what tried to come through it. I remember that sack wore out pretty quickly and had to be replaced often. You knew it when something got through.

I'd think being out in the open like in this photo would be a real pain, literally.

 

[TractorGuy]

I tried that once with a single rear end. Didn't cut for crap and first dip I hit the blade dug in and tried to launch the whole thing. After that I flipped the rear end over and used ground power through some step up pulleys to make a homemade finish mower.

 

[sixdogs]

I recently saw a mower with the sides cut off so the blades stuck out beyond the framework of the mower. The use was to cut under the leaves of a crop where spray would have killed the crop. Certainly scary but it did the job.

 

[ovrszd]

"Necessity is the Mother of Invention".