Reg, were you talking about the picture that I posted? If so, that is a reference picture, not my flail, although mine is similar.. Now that you mentioned it, I don't know about the outside blades. I will have to check. If I remember right, I had some space past the last hanger, but if I see things beat to he**, then I will know.
No, this was from a rare fastidious moment I had when I first got my mower.
Sometimes I get this "thing" about new equipment and anticipate the day when I have to take it apart for maintenance/repair and find stuff rusted together.
I got the tools out and one-by-one took every shackle apart to grease the threads.
{OK, fastidious but rare}
That was when I noticed what I assumed to be an assembly error on the leftmost shackle, two Ls like this LL so I "corrected" it.
About a week later the tractor stalled as I engaged the PTO to mow, same thing happened when I tried again, so I investigated - - Yes, tractor off, key in pocket, mower raised but not properly supported, etc.
The leftmost shackle & knives had flopped down and jammed to the left, I was able to turn the shaft backwards and all was well. It is the sort of thing that might never happen again, but I remembered the correction I had made and correctly corrected it.
(-:
On any given mower it might never happen at all, just the randomness of where the drum stops and which way the knives and shackles flop when it spins down.
