My new/old single horse mower

Nice mower, Ed. I just brought one home today, McCormick Deering New Ideal, G-302 stamped on the gear cover. About the same drive system that you have, 5 ft bar, needs some work before I can use it. Do you just give the gears a few squirts of oil every few rounds? I don’t have any experience with these mowers, guess I will now.

Hi ed,
nice mower. Looks and sounds great. Tuned , oiled and sharp, they are supposed to run like a sewing machine. Not sure I ever got that close, but this spring I chose to adjust my lead, cause its always been behind. It’s a job, separating the whole cutter bar from the mower so you can screw out on the coupling bar, pushing the cutter bar ahead. After I did that, the knife was out of time or register, so I had to unscrew the lead bar, but the threads were rusted and pitted and no spare so in the end I had to tighten it up, improving the lead but way off register, so then I had to break the law and shorten up the pitman stick, and after that was fixed, it made the tilt adjustment too short, so I have to bend a new rod for that. Whew, didn’t know what I was biting off there. Hope it will be worth the effort.

Tim, my grand dads mower was a deering stamped with the same part number. still have it. It also was stamped giant at the base of the seatpost. I believe it was new around the first world war. May be the same as yours. I think the gears ran in an oil bath, and you oiled the outside gears as liberal as you could, and the axle caps, too. And a shot on the knife under the holddown clips. But that’s taking my memory back along way.

hi ed,
is there a pawl on the lifting arm that holds the cutter bar off the ground? if so, you can rotate it up and out of the way so that your pedal lifts and drops the cutter bar without the pawl catching. and when you want to carry it up, turn the pawl back down and it catches in one of two positions, just off, and higher off the ground. the pawl itself is adjustable, threaded with two nuts on two sides of a clamp. if you lengthen it out it should seat in those slots better and shouldn’t fall on its own. hope that isn’t too confusing. watch out for the lifting arm. if it falls to the ground on its own, it could give you knee a good whack on the way by.