Combines Gleaners in snow

[Rolf]

G'Day Dan I can't comment on the hyped 62 but your sure have made a difference to ROM! he hasn't got out of the combine for two day's!!! it's like your given him a new lease on life, normally he get out at the end of the day and grissels and grumps at why I haven't done this or that! (Im the dumb truck driver!! out in the dust, heat and flys) But Dan your have hype him to another level, He's got drive, he's got the bit between his teeth for the first time in years, I can't get near the dam header as soon as he's dumped he's off for another load and back into it again, you have even got him to drive the header after dark!!!!! Thanks Dan and Friends for all your help to hype ROM!! (Rolf's Old Man) with attachment (94 R62 Fully hyped Combine!) PS: I had the whip on him for the first two day's of harvest and we have had a light shower of rain tonight and more to come tomorrow so ROM has earned his rest!! 10+km_hr in 3.4 ton crop Barley Crop is nice to see. Rolf

 

[R_O_M]

Don't be fooled folks! Thats 10+ Kph as measured with the GPS, in a 3.4 tonnes _ hectare Barley crop, not per acre! Cheers.

 

[R_O_M]

Dan, I think that the usual material flow rules in the rotor may have been altered with the incorporation of the sweeps. The material in the seperator is now a very thin, very fast flowing mat due to the speed the that the sweeps are pushing material through. We only have small grains and harvest at, by some of your standards, low moisture levels of no more than 12.5%. I think this also alters the rules from harvesting crops such as corn. With a thin mat in the seperator, the bars can be shimmed out a lot closer to the cage than under the old set-up where a lot more material was in the separator at any one time. We have not used a built in cage bar but I installed a set of cage pegs after the first day and cut our rotor losses by at least another 2_3rds to very low levels, at least for barley. We have not stopped rotor losses completely but are close. With the pegs I checked for HP losses but could not detect any. I should add that we have the cage material over our separator grate. The grate, fixed on our machine, does not seem to be of any benefit and with the sweeps and a thin mat could even create a problem area to the fast flow of the material. There are other very big benefits to using the rotor sweeps which don't seem to be mentioned previously. Fuel consumption is well down as the engine governors just hold a steady RPM with little surging.. Driving is a soda as the variations in the crop and the driver's judgement of crop conditions are also smoothed out. The boost pressure gauge is dead easy to hold at a steady 25 lbs boost or continous full load, something I have always had problems doing previously. I also noticed much better feeding from the header to the elevators. Even with our best previous endeavours on rotor and cage mods, there must still have been some back-up of material in the cage which influenced smooth feeding way down at the header. last year we shimmed the bars in the last section next to the discharge with quite an improvement in capacity, so this year we went the whole hog. It certainly seems to work.Thanks to you and tbran and all the others who have contributed to these ideas. We now have a combine that on a tonnes per hour measured against the available engine HP may be amongst the best capacity rated machine of all combines. Cheers

 

[Rolf]

Puff, puff, pant, pant! Hey boy's want to lose weight! Hype your Combine the Hurrt way and then become the truck driver!!! Three day to harvest 150 Hectares of barley and cart to home storage with one truck and including a couple of rain breaks in between! I "estimate" 30 ton an hour average including all the unloading at field bin (we use a 45 ton mother bin) The dumb truck driver!!

 

[RamRod]

I have run a few times in snow with the R's and have been well pleased how they handle it. The roof over the sieves can get too warm from the engine above it and can build up there. Best to be below about 26 degrees with no sunshine and works good. Is nice to have a machine that you can reach the whole chaffer with a snow brush in those tough times - looking at how some newer machines are enclosed in back and have very long shoe systems - IJIJ love the overall layout and performance of the Gleaners if you get caught with weather trouble.

 

[NDDan]

Well the heaters are good for days like today. Fuel that was in some machines would not flow. We've been sitting near the 0 degrees F lately. Just a couple guys still doing sunflowers and couple patches of corn. You guys best be taking alot of credit for yourselves for your hyped up Gleaner. You surely did add your own twist to the system. Did you end up running thresher helicals with an extra couple inch spacing between them similiar to pictures you sent meIJ Best of luck as you head into your other crops. Have a good one and ENJOY.

 

[NDDan]

Well the heaters are good for days like today. Fuel that was in some machines would not flow. We've been sitting near the 0 degrees F lately. Just a couple guys still doing sunflowers and couple patches of corn. You guys best be taking alot of credit for yourselves for your hyped up Gleaner. You surely did add your own twist to the system. Did you end up running thresher helicals with an extra couple inch spacing between them similiar to pictures you sent meIJ Best of luck as you head into your other crops. Have a good one and ENJOY.

 

[R_O_M]

Hi Dan. Yes, we took the easy way out. 1st standard helical, against gearbox was left as is. First steep pitched helical started right against the original 1st standard gear box helical and went to short filler helical across the feeder housing opening. Another 4 helicals parallel to the first steep pitched helical fitted including a last short helical, about 15" long on the left side of the concave section. There is one less helical than the standard helical set up. All helicals extend 3" or more across the transition area from concave to seperator. Some gassing of holes in the cage housing was required but if the chrome is ground of first the gas works OK. Else where helicals are held to the cage by the standard bolts through a 40mm x 40mm x 5mm thick washer. We have noticeable cage wear for about 2" wide on the seperator cage section adjoining the concave section. This occurred with our previous rotor set up,even though we had no reverse bars. I think now that this bank up of material exiting the concave may have had a considerable influence on our capacity as the material was obviously stalling there and not flowing freely into the seperator section. The first separator sweep now projects an inch into the concave section and will overcome this problem. Getting sweep diameter curves right eventually entailed the rotor set-up to enable turning on bearings, a RHS bar, clamped on solid stands, parallel to rotor and Rolf slowly turning the rotor as I gassed the sweeps to the right diameter using the RHS as a torch rest. A couple of minutes grinding to smooth the sweeps off, add the neccessary weights to get the balance as near as dammit and she was ready to put back into to the cage. We have only harvested barley so far and still have wheat and lentils to go so the rotor performance is going to be of great interest. Whether shimming the bars out to the extent we did is of benefit we don't yet know but based on the improvement last season when we did the last discharge section it seemed the way to go. Most straw exiting the rotor discharge is now much longer and more intact than any previous set up we have had. The discharge is a very even flow with no lumps and therefore minimum losses. These figures won't be relevant to north America but we were harvesting between 10 and 12 kph or an average speed of 11 KPH x 9.1metre [ 30ft ] header to give an average acreage of 10Ha [ 25 ac. ]_ hr while actually harvesting. Yield averaged 3.55 tonnes _ Ha. = 35 tonnes of barley _ hr or at a rate of over 1500 bus_ hr. Combine is a 94 R62. If we got 2_3rds of that performance previously we thought we were going very well and with much greater rotor losses. I really think you should change your moniker to "Dan's Combine Diagnostic Services" The amount of valuable info you and tbran hand out is phenomenal. Thank you and Cheers!