Combines cylinder losses in tough wheat

[dumfrmr]

I have a R-72 and some times run Shelborne stripper. In tough barley ( wheat has not been as big of problem) the rotor cage becomes covered with leaves and fine straw. Their is very little straw when running stripper to wipe the cage clean. If do a quik stop ( just kill the engine while machine is full ) and open the cage hatch you will see a completely covered cage. Have switched to highwire concaves, and tightened up both concaves, removed evey other wire in seperator concave and have reduced, but not eliminate the problem. This is much worse in malt barley as this just skins barley and makes $7 malt $4 feed. Don't buy the "too many returns idea" as all you would have to do is reduce speed and losses would go away. It's D@n$ hard to over load sieve in long sieve R combines. Do like the stripper header when straw is dry. Can do 1800-2500 bu. per hr. barley ( ag leader says )when moving. Have thought that maybe those "9600s" or other conventional would benifit more from stripper more that rotors. No cage to plug, and walkers have nothing to do. Straw stays in field with stripper. But then their pitiful clean grain elevators would not take it away.

 

[Dan]

I would check with header dealer to find spot where a bunch are sold onto Gleaner. I would imagine you have the cylinder bars extended and feeder shocks and head is feeding well. We've got only a couple stripper heads around and they are SR which had touble feeding smoothly and consistantly into feed chain. I got him to extend auger flighting across feeder opening and things went alot better. If problem is plugging between cylinder bars and cage I would shim out some cylinder bars on seperator side of cage. We've done this with 1_4" flat iron to try help performance for some condition at one time. I believe Rolf in Australia has some bars spaced out with 10mm flat iron to prevent this material bridging in his hot dry harvest conditions. Be sure to grind down rasp where shimed bars are over concave to prevent contact. Be sure to secure well with the proper length and grade of bolts. Scars me what a loose cylinder bar can do in cage. You may want to look back and think about that Agitator_pusher bar talked about earlier for it might help you out in that condition. To early to say what that bar will do at this point. I would think that you limit the bridging affect between cylinder bars and cage with a stripper head installed and the limiting factor would be how fast you can safely drive, at least with the 260hp plus 62 or 72. May need backup plates to support the paddles in clean grain elevator to help handle the load of all them seeds of grain. Do you have Agco or SR stripper head and if SR do the rotor teeth have ribbed metal leeding the plastic teeth for they seam to pull in more straw thus taking more powerIJ I think the metal is new in the last couple years but don't know much about them. The metal will likely wear smooth with some use thus not pulling much straw. Anyway good luck with whatever you try.

 

[Rolf]

G'Day I need to put the record straight at my end! I haven't been keeping everybody up to date with my upgrades!!! sorry!! 94 R62 30 ft 500 flex Cummins We are using the 50 mm PVC pipe in wheat and barley because it helps feeding so much, it will help in canary seed, linseed and any crop that is standing ! the feather sheets have had a extra fold put in them because in the first year we had it, the barley was sliding across the sheets then hitting the small steel strip that holes the back of the feather sheets down and then bouncing back into the cut crop, and stopping more barley from been feed into the front! (slugs) Table auger has been sped up from 140 rpms to 180, knife drive slowed down (don't remember by how much!!) centres extension on table auger, shocks on feeder chains hump on rock door, no feed chain sprocket guards (that big bar just in front of the top rear feed chain sprockets has been removed),we have a cage reticulation bar on the top of the thresher opening to help to stop material from been spat back down the feeder!! Our front has been to heck and back due to the hard conditions that it has to work in when harvesting lentils!!!! (that s another story for later!) Our rotor set-up for small grains, 1_2 inch rasps on thresher end of rotor, 3_4 on sep end, All forward raps bars, eight (8) extended rasps on discharge end of rotor, third helical extension, last three (3) helical extended at discharge, concave adjusted up in minimum (3 mm gap at front of concave when fully closed!) separator concave cage cover with N7 reverse bar bolted at bottom of sep end on top of concave cage cover. We have gone away from the shimmed out sep rasp bars as they were getting to close to the cover over the sep grate and we had no room to move!!! also we felt that the shimmed out rasps didn't really do much in our very very dry grain and straw!! I think we would do better with may be inch rasps bars and that are a bit deeper that the 3_4 inch ones that we currently haveIJIJIJIJIJ We are considering the hyper sep grate that only has half the number of rasps in it and take the cage cove offIJ (simple to do, and we can go back to the cover and be no worse off!!!!!) we have slowed the clean grain and repeats down by 24 %, sped the fan up by 5%, slowed the riddle box down by 5% because of fan speed increase, Stainless steel Acc rollers. there might be some other thing that I have missed out for the moment but I thinks that's about the gut's of it. I believe that we have made about a 10 to 15 % increase in capacity but we haven't had a really good year to try her out yet! stats: 2001_2002 season in aprox 2.5 ton _hectare wheat, 9 meter front , could run at 12.5 km_hr till half box then back to 9.5 _10 km_hr when full! 8.2 ton box full. it's only about 900 bushels_hr but in that crop that was frosted the straw was for a crop of around 4 ton_Hectare I think all going well I should still be able to get around those speeds in a good crop!IJ!IJ!IJ!IJ some changes to the sep grate like I said should get our grain losses well below a bushel_acreIJ its under that now but it can be a bit fiddly to get right!! grain quality has been excellent, and soooo smoooth to run!!!!!! Hope that fill you all in Regards Rolf PS: sorry for the novel!

 

[moose]

I have thought about a conventional combine with the stripper header. Talked to a guy who runs a different colour and he says that the stripper header eliminated any concerns about the other coloured combine (mainly walker loss). We are currently running high wire concaves in both our combine. We are running the concaves tight, we tried adding filler plates, as many as six but it seemed to aggrivate the cylinder loss problem. One combine has a shelbourne header the other an agco. would you have any other suggestions to help stop rotor loss in tough wheat.

 

[Dan]

Yea I bet the shimmed out cylinder bars got very close to cover. I like that idea of very wide gaps between rasps. I set up a complete cylinder like that one time to try out in edible beans. That cylinder looked very mean. It did a fine job for me but didn't convey damp bean straw any better than standard and that is what I was looking for. Have you ever tried them scalper bars or whatever they are called over there. I know of a guy up in Canada that filled in top of feeder opening also by about 3" and he said there was less back feeding. I haven't seen much trouble with backfeeding but can see how it could happen with feed chain so fully exposed. I suppose there could be alot of backfeeding that you wouldn't see from cab. I'm surprised that you haven't seen a whole lot more increase in capacity but I suppose with your hot dry harvesting conditions you wouldn't see as much as us for we are damp alot of the time. I might add that the only thing we do to currant machines is add the third helical and remove reverse bars before they go out. They are the most important two things and very easy to do. Of course we fine tune from there as time permits depending on majority of crops it will be in.