mo1
Platinum Member
Sickle mowers leave the grass nice and even in the swath because they just snip the plants' stalks and they fall over the sicklebar when it passes. Any kind of rotary mower has some propensity to propel what it has cut in a direction tangential to the rotation of the cutterhead, such as how your lawnmower blades turn clockwise as viewed from above and shoot grass out of the right side of your mower deck. Rotary mowers such as disc and drum mowers are a lot faster than sickles and this is why they are so widely used today, the narrower windrows are a consequence of the cutter design, particularly with the drum mowers. You can also intentionally make narrow windrows with most drawn hay cutters by adjusting the width of the swath doors in the back. We run ours pretty much wide open and everybody else here does the same as the wider swaths dry better than a narrow windrow.
I can think of one reason somebody would intentionally make a narrower windrow right out of their cutter and then ted it. If they know that due to crop and drying conditions that they have to ted anyway and want to make the windrows narrow enough they don't have to drive over them when tedding, and do the tedding pretty shortly after cutting so they don't lose much drying time of having the swath spread wider to begin with.
