Combines Enclosed Rotor

AGCO's rotor is a pretty close copy of the rotor which we've been building for 3 years. However, we've developed a few economies such as using your present rotor shaft and reusing or rebuilding your old rotor bars when possible. This cuts the cost by a large margin. email or call for info. Terry Welch St. John Welding St. John, KS (800) 549-3289

tj: I've a hypered 99 72. Does a great job. I raise wheat and legumes. What would be the advantages of an enclosed rotor for my machineIJ

Excuse the belated reply -- ended up with several urgent missions. I'll try to keep this somewhat short -- An enclosed cylinder provides a much more active rolling and fluffing of material which is being fed thru the machine (this is what your high_low setup does with it's pull and release action). The crop separates more quickly and easily, lessening the requirement for tearing up MOG for separation -- cleaning shoe load is reduced by quite a bit, and cage helicals provide better resistance to larger components of MOG for easier carry thru to the discharge area. Horsepower and rotor RPM requirements for infeed and carry thru are reduced, in some crops and conditions by a substantial margin. Fuel usage also lessens considerably. The rotor bars are mounted flatter so the front vertical component of the teeth is used for feeding and aggressive movement of material, and this negates the requirement some operators have for changing from wide space to narrow space rotor bars as they move into differing crops. Rotor bar life is also extended. Balance, obviously, is much easier to maintain, and with most of the turning weight on the periphery of the cylinder, higher inertia provides for easier carry thru in vine crops or weedy conditions. This inertia also greatly lessens shock loading on the drive coupler and gearbox. There's more to this, but these are the main points. Hope it's reasonably clear. If more questions arise I'll try to answer them, but there may be some delay due to my schedules.

You must of quoted price of the currant open cylinder assembly from Gleaner. Don't think they have pricing done on final build of their enclosed cylinders. I'm sure Terry got you the pricing on his St John system and hopefully someone will get you pricing of currant Sunnybrook Gen 2 system. Bison system will likly be priced in the $7000US range. We havn't did a whole lot of comparing of one rotor to the next. The enclosed systems will surely not get out of balance with uneven dust distribution which can be sickening in some conditions with higher cylinder speeds. We have spent most of our time modifing the open cylinder to flow straw well (for instance extending cylinder bars to discharge on older rotors before Gleaner started doing at factory, extending everyother cylinder bar to end of cylinder assy., installing rotor sweeps, ect.) The guys that wanted to break less corn cobs would install half height bars and or some just left some bars off. I would imagine the rotor Terry would build for you would be a six bar enclosed that allready has at least everyother bar extended to end of rotor and at least the mounts for his version of rotor sweeps. Sunnybrook Gen 2 stegers the position of cylinder bars and uses angled kicker to get material last few inches to discharge. Sunnybrook uses a four paddle discharge on end of rotor to kick material into chopper or discharge beater. If you should ever be running a Sunnybrook with all forward bars and struggling with HP consumption be sure to switch out the rolled back discharge paddles with straight ones. I have also made rotor sweeps to fit Sunnybrook. Finally for what I'm quite sure the Gleaner enclosed will have: Six bar rotor built to 24" diameter for corn soybean areas. Bars will likely be leaned into flow like on open cylinder and discharge likely similiar to Sunnybrook. Maybe they will have cylinder convertable to go to 25" for more small grain areas. They will also have kickers between the rows of bars to aggitate and keep the material moving toward discharge. Can't wait to get one of them new rotors up against the old open rotor that has the rotor sweeps and everyother bar extended to end of rotor. Oh yea almost forgot. This year will be first full year testing of Bison. Should be able to get it into more crops and conditions. Anyway all these rotors can be made to work very well in most crops and conditions. Better quit now for this is long enough.