Combines Alfalfa

I seldom make suggestions on an item I have not had personal experience in, others may have some more input but, here goes... We have done a little bit of alfalfa years ago with no problem, but our crop was dry. Sounds like you have the same problem we run into on rice. Straw or MOG breakup. The cure we found was the same as we preach in our condiditons out of the hard red winter wheat area. We take all our tradeins and new combines, remove all reverse bars, (on the RH reverse bar removal we now install a short 4" forward bar we cut to fit as we are seeing some back up bar wear here but not on the lH bar, this is after 1000 hours of harvesting) make sure extended bars-short paddles are installed on discharge end, and then we install 2 steep pitch helicals over the thresher and transititon them into the std pitch. We have pictures available if you need them. When we get the new cylinders in we will shim OEM helicals or install bars from lowen who are building some higher profile steep pitch bars for us to try. They will not be chromed at first till we evaluate. We also install our chopper blades which are sharpened back up paddle gussets. The picture of these can be seen if you click on hypermods and go to cylinder mods. Dan's cylinder sweeps would probably also help in your situation. The idea is to prevent the second pass threshing. The steep pitch helicals move the crop to the separator grate after threshing. This prevents your grinding of wet material, it also prevents so much cob break up, lessens HP requirements and lessens grate wear on the lH side. Also high wire grates or std with every other wire removed results in longer pieces and less bridging due to incresed weight of pieces. Finally in some wet crops we find that a good cleaning job of the sides above the dist augers and a paint job with slip plate will also help prevent bridging. On some machines in wet crops we have found a certain area will 'bridge'. In those cases we install a cage cover off a P1 or N series in that area to prevent the area plugging. Whew, hope this helps.

I think he is talking about his N5. If he is he would want to be sure he installed the green stem kit when he shimmed the helicals. That is the kit that added a row of helicals to thresher side and hooked up the steeper pitch helicals on thresher side to the shallower pitch seperator side. A step better for handleing the green alfalfa straw would be channel iron helicals. Rotor sweeps would help greatly but I have never designed any to fit the P1s. You see with that wet green material the original cylinder bars on seperator side, even if all forward, won't move the material over the best. What would be best to do is either wait awhile until material dries down or keep the material moving. The material not moving have everything to do with overloading the distribution augers. I have saw a couple things on the distribution auger systems of the P1s. You want to be sure that when augers were made they have a positive lean of flighting in direction of flow, the paddles on augers can not be to close to auger trough for they will pinch the material and stop with any excess amount of material, also accelerator rolls should be in good condition. Don't overlook the condition of the main seperator drive belt on right side of machine behind cylinder varible belt on mainshaft. The belt must be tight and not bottomed in that pulley. I think if he upgraded the rotor area to whatever degree he wants he would do a much better job in the wet green conditions. Have a great day.

Thanks fella's I understand all that. It has stacked helicals and no reverse bars and it flys in wheat etc which is my main. Dont really do that much alfalfa seed 20 to 100 acres a year if its there. Would love channel helicals but not until i wear flats out . Will try some rotor sweeps first . 2388 harveted at 12 days and it was dry. Heaps of dust as oppossed to hardly any when i tried . I'm pretty sure mine would have went better in the dry but too many things going on and it did rain next day so glad to get nice little crop off just in case i had trouble. Will try again next year. Thanks pengs5

War story - We also used another trick with a customer who had a field of soybeans overtaken with solid stand of huge green onions. THAT was a miserable eye watering experience. We cut 6 1_4" X 6" X 1" rectangular bars and suspended them with chain from the cage or back door and allowed them to swing or the lower ones to just hit the auger flighting so as to jiggle back and forth and prevent bridgeing. Did help but did not cure the problem. Finally did get the field cut. And in this case a couple of other rotaries didn't have any success either. F2 did help cut and did a fair job but decided he had had enough after a bin full.. These Onions are tough.