tj
Guest
This is most definitely a threshing problem, since you're seeing unthreshed pods and chunks of wheat heads on the shoe. It's likely that your concavfe is worn out and bowed down in the center, as well (typical of JD concaves). In order to provide thresh, the concave has to retard the flow of material so it can rub on itself and the cylinder bars can fluff it for separation. As the crossbars round over, the retarding effect is lost. Then, in order to knock the grain loose and keep it from the straw walkers, it's required to raise the front of the concave more tightly. When the concave is pulled up tightly in front, chunks of wheat heads and some unthreshed bean pods are forced thru before they can be threshed and go directly to the shoe (whitecapping).Also at that point, in order to feed the machine and maintain decent ground speed, a faster cylinder speed will be required since space for the material from the feeder to enter the threshing area becomes very limited. This cylinder speed will cause overthreshing, sending even more trash to the shoe, and since the load against the concave is thinner will cause cracking, especially at the outer ends. Also, these small overthreshed pieces will require tighter cleaning sieve setting--tighter sieve setting sends more grain as return back to the cylinder where it will be dumped directly onto operating metal components causing more cracking, especially at row ends where the feeder house unloads. In our area, wirth the hours you mentioned, that machine would have had OEM concaves replaced at least twice, and would most likely have about 300 hours on the 3rd one. There's more detail to this, but this is basically what's probably happening. Hope this is clear.