Combines Hillco Fan Kit Need Info

Hippo, I am afraid this website has died. I keep checking in to see if anyone answers your question and it is pretty lonely. I bought a 1480 at a sale a month ago. It has no fan updates and I am wondering the same thing about the Hillco update. I think I will contact the Hillco people and suggest they give me some names of satisfied users. If I find something out I will post it. Harlan Ebright

Make that three of us. I installed the air deflector last fall and am pleased with the results but find that I can many times in corn and beans now run with the fan wide open and have no grain blown out.This means cleaner grain, less red dog in corn and much better chaff spreading in beans. Without the deflector i couldn't run quite this amount of air so am wondering if the hilco kit would add more air to the center and result in still better cleaning. Phil , Future farming solutions, if you are out there would you comment.

I like the looks of the Hillco unit. I wish we hadn't ever installed the crossflow so that we could use it. Seems like you always need more air, and the crossflow is not supposed to have as much volume as the original.

The problem is not total air flow, but uneven air flow. With the old paddle fans the air to the shoe was uneven, with more on the outside and less in the middle, so separation on the chaffer suffers. Hillco tried to come up with an inexpensive fix the for problem with their fan kit, which I am sure helps some. But not to long after they came out with their kit CIH came out with the crossflow fan and retro-fit kits to install them on older machines to fix the uneven air problem. So the market dried up and now they are trying to unload the remaining kits. It is not a Cross-flow fan, but I am sure they are worth the $100 the Gordon is selling them for. I suspect that Gleaner has or had a patent on the transverse or cross-flow fan which they have used since the F_M_l models came out which CIH and Deere had to work around.

I agree the old fan may starve somewhat at high speed, but the crossflow is really uneven front-to-rear. The longer shoe in the newer machines makes it even worse. For some crops, the short shoe and the old fan with the Hilco kit probably would work very well. If you need maximum capacity, like maybe for cornIJ, the long shoe may be required. However, the extra capacity comes at the expense of getting the high air flow needed for a super clean sample, in my opinion.

I hope I didn't insult anyone by suggesting they were dead but I appreciate all the responses. I'm not sure what we have decided though. Should I try the Hillco kit in my 1980 1480 that has no other improvementsIJ I have run a JD7720 since 1980 and about 8 years ago was convinced to cover the front 12 inches of my seives which redirected the airflow and kept particularly milo stalks from hanging up as they came off the back of the pan. I think it was a big improvement and have never taken them back out for corn, soybeans, wheat or milo. Does anybody do something similar in this style of an IHIJ Thanks. Harlan Ebright

Harlan,no problem as the board is a little slower...spring work is starting..a lot of what covering the front on your 7720 is what you are doing with the air deflector on your 1480..I would do that first and then go with the Hillco if you want to further improve air flow...other wise you will just get more air in the front and stuff will not be suspended in the rear...keeping that MOG or chaff suspended all the way to the rear is what improves sieve capacity and allows the factory spreaders to catch and disperse it more thoroughly