Combines 9650 STS in hard red spring wheat

It takes me about 30-45 mins to switch the concaves on the STS. If you have another person to help with the handling of the concaves it makes it even easier to change. Your dealer must take alot of coffee breaks if it takes a few hours to change concaves.

It is going to depend on your situation. We take most our wheat at 15% to 17% moisture and some green in the straw. We wouldn't even try anything other than small wire concaves with quite a few cover plates. Even with that setup the STS does a marginal job. If you have nice dry conditions with dead ripe wheat you can get by with quite a few different setups. I've heard of some guys just using one small wire in front and round bars in the back two. Another thing to consider is if you have any tough green stemmed soybeans, the round bars may not be agressive enough. We ran last year using the small wire concaves with the interrupter bars removed and every other wire pulled out. It turned them into large wire concaves. It gave the nicest sample of beans I've ever seen. It might be another way to justify buying a second set of concaves. If you do decide to go for the small wires, loewen makes what I think is a better product for less money. Good luck.

If you only have 200 or so acres then I would run round bar with the soybean inserts. If you have 2000 I would probably buy the small wire. It will work ok in average conditions. The small wire concaves costs about $3,000 bucks.

Big Benny (built like the provebial brick outhouse!!) and myself held the record in our crew last year for the fastest time changing from wire to round bar concave on a 9650 sts using air guns, 18 minutes 40 secs!!!

The wheat moisture is usually around 13 percent and the straw isn't that tough. How clean a sample can I expect with round bars and the soybean insertsIJ

With round bar concaves and inserts, you'll need to run the concaves tighter in order to provide thresh. This means a little faster rotor speed in order to maintain throughput. If straw breaks up fairly easily, you'll likely see a heavy load on the cleaning shoe due to rotor speed and tight concave setting. Concaves with square corners on the crossbars will retard the flow of material better for thresh at wider concave settings with slower rotor speeds, will require less HP and trash won't be torn up as badly so separation will be much better thru the concaves and separator grates -- larger components of trash are fed more easily by the vanes and won't be forced thru the rear grates as easily, lessening shoe loading. We have a couple sets of hardfaced small grain concaves available at our location. Email for info if you'd like. Hope this makes sense.

If the option costs an extra $1200 on a $180,000 machine, go ahead and get them. They aren't very difficult to change, especially if you install carriage bolts in place of the cap screws that Deere uses. The headaches you'll save will be well worth the extra couple of bucks you spend on the payment each year.

order your round bar concave and if it is a new combine you will get one set of filler plates(3).install these 3 plates and you will have no trouble doing a perfect job on spring wheat. when you go to change back to beans it's about a 60 sec. job to remove the filler plates. if your combine does not have the filler plates you can order them from your dealer for $120.cdn.