Video Transcript: 

You cannot be too good on your knife maintenance whether you’re out there every day just checking your hold downs and adjusting it, or replacing a sickle once in a while when they get chipped or they get cracked. It’s something that just can improve your overall harvest. If we want to do this same procedure on header that’s equipped with the PlugFree™ Knife Guards, it’s very similar to what we just demonstrated on the pointed guards. You can watch how to perform your knife maintenance on a cut a bar with pointed guards. The link is in the description below.

We’ve assembled our arsenal of tools here.  We’ve got the big impact with the 18mm, because I know you’re going to use an impact. We got the baby impact with a 10mm, One baby torque wrench for torquing the section bolts. Some feeler gauges to check the hold down. We’ve got a new section and a new guard. Little bit bigger torque wrench for torquing down the guard bolts.

These are perfectly fine guards, we’ll just show you the remove and install procedure. again with your preferred tool. This being a two piece guard, this is what’s considered our hold down. And there’s our bottom short PlugFree™ Knife Guard. If we wanted to replace the section, it’s the exact same procedure as it was on the pointed guard. We just remove the 10mm bolts, take out the old section, throw it away, put a new one in place. Now, notice that there are no little connectors on this. This header is a double knife configuration, which means it drives from both ends to short knives driving in and out. There are still a bunch of connectors, but they don’t extend as far. Make sure if you’re stripping down the whole knife, make sure you put them all back on again. If it’s a single knife, you’re going to have almost ten feet of these little connectors over here. We’ve got about five feet because it’s a shorter knife.

When you take these off, inspect the poly. If it’s worn out, replace at the same time. Get yourself a new guard. Once again this one’s got a backer on it. it’s in perfect shape. Out of the box, ready to go. The bolts are carriage bolts so you don’t have to hold them with a wrench or anything.  We go line it up. Remember this is considered a hold down. Put that in place. That will snug those up. Just about bang on that one. Same torque on the PlugFree™ Knife Guard as it is on the Pointed Knife Guards. We want to check our hold down clearance. Now, in this case, you can see right here our section is not in the proper position to for us to check our hold down clearance. You’ll have to manually stroke your knife. You can do that on the end by manually rotating the knife drive box. All right.  right here. This is the flywheel for our knife, you get in here with the bar, you can manually rotate this over, and we just want to stroke it until the knife lines up with the guard tip.  We apply some downward pressure to the section to make sure that it’s against the bottom guard.  I’m using a tensile feeler gauge. Our spec is .004 to .020´´. That’s a little loose. Now on this one we’ve got an adjuster for each tip, you can actually get a tighter tolerance on a PlugFree™ Knife Guard than you can a pointed guard.  Again, we adjust the same way. And it feels pretty good, it’s nice and snug on .010´´. Good to go.

Learn more:
FD2 Series FlexDraper® Header, visit our product page.
FD2 PLUS Series FlexDraper® Header, visit our product page.
D2 Series FlexDraper® Header, visit our product page.
D2 Series FlexDraper® Header, visit our product page.

For additional resources check out our Owners Resources or visit your local MacDon Dealer.