I'm passing on our experiences (and those of a few others, as well)concerning feeding into a misaligned setup. This also applies to IH specialty rotors (and a little more so, actually)with their short rotor bars -- ears of corn will wrap around those mounts and break even somewhat worse. That's the primary reason our host Marv Gorden developed his IH rotor bars -- to close up the space between the rotor bar mounts and roll, rather than bend the ears of corn. In the 9790, the vine knives may have an effect in very tough stems -- there's no question that they'll grab a stem and either carry it or cut it. However, I think it's more likely the fact that this rotor has P3 bars installed on it. We've been modifying these rotors with these bars for considerably longer than AGCO has been producing the 9790, and so far, we've never installed more than 9 rotor bars on any of them. We use a much different spiral type arrangement for rotor bar mounting, but on our rotors no operator has ever used vine knives. I will say that on the 9790 with the abundance of rotor bars installed in rows, that the vine knives may have a little more effect - may be breaking up slugs caused by straight rows of bars. This rotor is enclosed, and is 14' in length, allowing material to spread out much more evenly (at least the way we do it)and separation area of the concaves and grates runs about 80% of the full length of the rotor -- that's about 4 1_2' more length than R series Gleaner. Also, the front beater and auger arrangement spread out incoming material somewhat, and initial loading is more even than in a more conventional machine which has to take whatever slugs_bunches come up the feeder house. Difference between vine knives and sweep_agitators probably can be best explained by the differences in rotors-- On the CDF rotor, bars are mounted tipped forward and on the full diameter rotor mount_bar combination has a 3 1_2" depth -- the bar angle pushes material to the concave surface in a pinching effect and the depth of the mounting allows a little buildup -- the knives help to carry this buildup. On the flat bar mounting which we favor, the leading edges of the bars carry material and the depth is 2 1_2" to the top of the bar_mount combo. This has more of a tumbling effect than CDF and the material is pretty much spread automatically -- also the leading edges of the bars are muchmore aggressive at carrying thru. The sweeps are provided more as devices to agitate and change direction (more for providing separation) over the grate than to push to the discharge, although they do provide some of that effect. Did you have 1_2 of the rotor bars off in your drought cornIJ Usually it's a matter of loading when cobs are breaking up. More cylinder bars on the rotor at any RPM reduce the load and the crop is forced to thresh against the metal workings as opposed to threshing against itself -- also, small diameter ears have more of a tendency to drop between concave crossbars and catch -- won't roll thru. If you had rotors bars removed, it may have been a matter of ground speed, but it's also possible that due to header operation, you may not have been able to maintain proper speed --not unusual in droughted crops due to flimsiness of stalks_stems. Can you email meIJ -- I'd like to point out something else.
