Evener Width on Horse Drawn Mowers.

This summer DAPnet will be raffling off a McCormic Deering #7 mower with a 6 foot bar. The mower will be completely rebuilt and made field-ready by Jay Bailey and Donn Hewes. I volunteered to build the evener for the new mower. The question for me is what size to build the evener.

For me, the size/width of the evener is secondary to matching the evener to the neck yolk. My thinking on this has been influenced by what Steve Bowers terms “lateral alignment” in his book Farming With Horses. According to Bowers, lateral alignment is defined as having a team of horses and the pole parallel to each other. Lateral alignment is achieved by having the evener, the cross checks on the lines, and the neck yoke all the same distance apart. In other words, if you have a 40” evener, your neck yoke should be 40” and your lines adjusted accordingly (i.e. to keep the horses heads’ at 40”). Having a 48” evener and a 40” neck yoke would result in the horses being canted together – resulting in an uncomfortable, inefficient situation especially when pulling a load.

The tricky thing about lateral alignment is that horses adjust and it often hard to spot. A friend starting with horses asked me to help him adjust the cross checks his lines as his horses carried their heads slightly to the outside. We tried adjusting the cross checks several times and they continued to carry their head slightly to the outside. Turns out his neck yoke was 4” narrower than his evener. After modifying the neck yoke and lines to match the evener, they straightened out nicely.

Based on Bowers’ thinking I decided early on to standardize all of my equipment. I started out with a 40” evener and decided to stick with it. Now all of my neck yokes and eveners are 40” and I don’t have to worry about adjusting my lines as a switch implements.

When I purchased my first mower, I was surprised to find that the evener was only 36”. I use two mowers for haying and have cut the original 36” eveners in half and welded some flat bar on both sides to make them 40”. Seems to work well. I also like a little extra space between the horses while mowing in hot weather. Putting the horses farther apart than the standard 36” does not put the off horse into uncut grass either and I believe there is room to spare for an even wider evener.

Here are my questions: What size evener do you use on your mowers? Given Bower’s theory, do you agree/disagree it is important to match neck yoke to evener? How wide should the raffled off mower evener be?

Thanks.

George

P.S. Here are the details on the mower raffle: “The tickets are for a #7 Mcd mower with a six foot bar. Winners can also chose $1,000 cash. The tickets are 1 for $10 or 5 for $30. We will pull the winning ticket at the Annual Gathering. You do not have to be present to win. We will have tickets available at: The Horse Progress Days, The NOFA Summer conference, The Common Ground Fair, and our Cultivating Workshop at Cedar Mountain farm. Also at the Annual Gathering and other local events. Please contact Donn Hewes to request tickets to sell at a local draft animal event, or to buy tickets directly. 607-849-4442, or email: tripletree@frontiernet.net”