How We Do It: Correcting shrinking collars

"We were having problems with the width of our collars. Like with many courses, our greens shrunk after every cleanup so and we needed to come up with a permanent solution to fix this problem. Our collar widths should be 30 inches, but they were between 20 and 24 inches and there was absolutely no uniformity among them. They were all off the wall.

"The first idea we had was to use threaded rod that we bolted to our greensmower. The threaded rod worked well, the only problem was it wasn’t universal and if you were doing a counterclockwise clean-up lap you couldn’t then go clockwise.

"One day I was driving home from work and I noticed this big CB antenna attached to someone’s truck. It struck me that this could be the perfect answer to our problem because it was magnetic, which would allow us to take it from reel to reel.

"The next day I went to radio shack and bought two CB antennas, which ran me about $14 a piece. The first thing we did was cut the cable off so we just had the antenna. Then we cut the antenna to the size of our collars. Then we placed the antenna on the edge of the reel so our guys had a visual where the collar ended in the rough. Our antenna is 30 inches long and we placed a pink pin flag on the end of it.

"We use it all of the time on our triplex unit. When our guys are sitting on the mowers they can see the pink pin flag. Now when they’re doing their clean up, that pink pin flag should be at the edge of the collar and the rough. The beauty about this is it’s magnetic, allowing you to move it to either side of the mower for clockwise or counterclockwise mowing.

"Now, we’re much more accurate and we have perfect uniform collars all the way around."