Grass Board for the IH #9

I'm still slowly wrapping things up on the mower.  One thing I did the past few days was to replace the grass board.

My sickle bar came with the bolt and the metal flange that screws to the wood.  I had planned on just buying a wood grassboard with the wood pole thing and get it back the way it used to be.

I was talking with Norman Macnair about this, and found that he had the parts, but that it was 75 plus 13 in shipping.  He offered me a different solution.  He told me to check with a local tractor house for a metal replacement grassboard.  He said it would cost around 45 bucks, and that they are universal and fit old mowers fine.

Kosch Grassboard.  The bars extend further than the picture shows. 

With help from my friend Pat, we found one at Nortex tractor house in Sulphur Springs TX.  It is a black metal grassboard made by Kosch.  It is supposed to fit all old makes of sickle mower.  The price tag was around $35.00.  I decided that I could handle using this instead of the old wooden style.

They only had one in stock, and it looked like it rattled around the delivery truck a good bit.  Lots of paint had been rubbed off and it was scuffed up.  This was no matter to me, and I bought it and brought it home.

I did a fit check on the sickle blade, and I didn't like the fit.  It would only go up 2-3 inches before the top of the grassboard was hitting the top of the outter shoe.  This seemed to be a problem.  I did a comparison to the original wood plate and found that this grassboard had more metal than I needed.  I took a grinder to it, and cut it off so it was the same dimension as the wooden grass board plate.

See that black corner sticking out in the upper left of the picture?  That needed to go bye bye.

I just took an angle grinder too it and smoothed it all out.  Then I decided to put a fresh coat of black paint on it to cover the freshly ground area, and all the scuffs and scratches it came with.

Hard to see the new part in this picture, but you can see how the new part is now rounded to match the old part.

Freshly painted and modified Kosch Grass Board

After a few coats of black paint, I took the new part out and did a fit check on that.  SUCCESS!  It fits great, and it gives plenty of upward motion.  I'm very happy about this.  Grassboard is complete and installed!

There it is!  Grass Board installed on the sickle bar.

Today or tomorrow I should get the last few parts in the mail and then the mower will be complete!

IH #9 Mower Page