NDDan
Guest
I hesitated awhile before posting this email I received but figured it has some good info for you. I cut and pasted all but his name. What he is refering to is an email I sent him when he was harvesting for he thought he was losing to much corn. I gave him some suggestions when he called and then sent the email he missed with other tricks we found quite promissing. Major hyper mods to his R42 are extended cylinder bars and rotor sweeps. Total % of yeild loss looks to be between 1_8 to 5_8. Dan Thanks for your kind sharing of your modifications to reduce corn losses on the R42, The modifications look interesting and deserve some serious attention and consideration this "off season". I was not expecting to receive your welcome e-mail after we chatted in October. I do not regularly check e-mails during the harvest rush and did not read this until November 16th evening. I suspect my wife or daughter may have received the e-mail and set it aside for me to read after harvest. I did, however, quickly take your phone advice and slowed rotor to 230 rpm and opened concave to 8-10. This coupled with really pushing the corn through ---6+ MPH ( 4row 30" head) -20%,150 -180bpa corn -reduced total loss to 0.5 - 2.5 kernels per square foot depending on hibred, time of day etc.. I figure this calculates to under 1_4 bpa loss to 1 1_4 bpa loss. This was total loss ----header, shoe and rotor . And no whole cobs were lost from header, the conditions were real good for no header loss this year. We could live with the losses at this rate, but we are always looking to do better. Would these two modifications reduce loses furtherIJ I was wondering why did keeping the rotor full reduce loss so muchIJ When I went a little slower on headlands and such places the losses increased. Also do you think your sweeps that we added were a benefit to this corn harvest or do they only shine in beans and wheatIJ . By the way, the R42 was much lower on losses than conventional Deeres and Axial flows in neighboring fields. The R42 was able to harvest much, much faster (almost 2 times) than neighbors ----they were picking at 3-3.5 MPH (their yeilds were no better) but their machines all had the slightly larger 4 row 36" head on CIH1680, CIH1666, JD7720 Tll, and JD9400. Maybe their losses would have gone down if they had also increased their ground speed IJ That little R42 with only a 4-30" can really harvest, what we consider, a lot of corn in a day at 6.25 MPH, we were well satisfied with its performance. Fuel use was under 1 US gallon per acre but i did not watch fuel use real close. Thank you again for your wonderful engineering and assistance in getting the most out of these zinc dipped machines, If I can be of any assistance to you or your business please do not hesitate to contact me.
