Knife guide arm

One of the key components of an oscillating cutting system, next to knife blades and mowing fingers, is the knife guide arm. Due to intensive contact with the crop and the general stress involved with professional mowing, the knife guide arm, like all other cutter bar components, requires regular maintenance. As with all work that is carried out on a cutting system, the utmost caution and care must be taken! Only a properly adjusted and maintained mower unit can deliver full power and ensure long component life. The regular maintenance and cleaning tasks that must be performed on each mower unit should also include an inspection of the knife guide arm. For this reason, we recommend checking that the knife guide is optimally adjusted as part of the routine mower blade inspection. The specific design must be considered, since the knife guide arm is designed differently depending on cutting system. The corresponding operating and assembly instructions for the cutting system should be consulted in each case. As a general maintenance measure, greaseable blade guide arms should be regularly lubricated with an environmentally friendly lubricant. It is important to ensure that the cutter bar is thoroughly cleaned of dirt and plant fibres first. Another basic maintenance measure for bar mowers includes the inspection of the amount of guide clearance. If the guide clearance exceeds 1 mm, it is to be set according adjustment instructions to 0.2-0.3 mm. It is important that all blades are on each other without play. Blades with worn pins need to be replaced quickly, since the knife guide arm can not work safely and the entire mower function can be affected by such pins. It is also important to ensure that the knife guide arm is not bent. Only a straight knife guide arm ensures optimum contact pressure between the blade back and bar back and thus ensures optimum cutting performance. If it is unclear whether the knife guide arm is bent, a comparison should be made with a scaled sketch.