Combines I was in Hesston last weekend and this is what I saw

As I understand it, The Allis Chalmers Co. got themselves into deep financial trouble in the early eighties when they spent a billion bucks US trying to scale up and develop the fluidised bed coal burning system for large electric power station boilers. This system worked ok in the small scale experimental plants but became a total disaster when attempts were made to scale it up to the very large full scale commercial power generating plant size. Deutz moved in, bought the Allis combine division, but Fiat bought the industrial division which to Deutz's surprise and dismay owned the rights to the new Gleaner down front thresher and separator system which later showed up briefly in some laverda combine pamphlets. Deutz started to play the financial markets in the eighties and at one stage was making more money on the financial markets than in all of it's industrial divisions. This came to crashing halt with the financial market melt down in 1988 and Deutz effectively went broke as it's financial division went belly up. There was a managment buyout of the Deutz _ Allis company from the remnants of Deutz in 1991 and the AGCO company was formed. One reason why the new N series with it's enormous capacity for those times, was somewhat unreliable in the early eighties was that Allis had run out of money to fix the problems. A spinoff from the Deutz debacle was that Deutz had just completed the high precision jigs for the R series when they hit the wall and the new owners, AGCO got the benefits of those jigs. On the class 8 or even 9 combines, there may be a market in the corn belt of the USA where the very high yields or volumne of grain per hectare [ 2.47 acres ] can justify the enormous capacity but for most of the rest of the world, the class 7 or smaller is as large as is needed due to the much lower tonnages per hectare. Even at harvesting speeds of 12 to 16 kilometres an hour [ 7.5 to 10 mph ] required to keep the combine full in the lower yielding crops, creates a great deal of wear and tear on the machine from any field roughness. As well, pushing 15 to 18 tonnes over heavy ground at those speeds makes for a very intensive maintenance program to keep a machine reliable through the season. A structural failure such as a busted axle or cracked frame can be fairly catasrophic in this case. There is also the problem of diminishing returns as the time spent in and resources required to keep the grain away from a class 9 or 10 machine becomes of increasing importance. Grain trucks cannot become much larger due to road regulations. Receival points are mostly fitted out with facilities geared to much lower tonnages coming in per day over longer periods. There is a place for the VlM's but only in a limited area of the world's grain producing regions. It will be long time before the current range of what is now becoming mid sized machines, become obsolete. I would also suggest that a good part of the demand for the larger machines just plain comes from the small boy syndrome, look! Mine is bigger than yours!

Some very interesting comments regarding the future of AGCO. What concerns many of us is history repeating itself in North America with what seems to be a thought pattern of Martin Richenhagen that parallels the Deutz thought pattern. In the first 6 months of 2007, sales at CNH and JD were way up for High Horsepower row crop tractors, at AGCO they were down. WhyIJ Starting a little over a year ago, management embarked upon a grand inventory reduction program in NA only to be followed by a bull market in commodities which led to AGCO being short inventory in a sellers market. Along with this faux paux, Mr. Richenhagen continually brags on conference calls on the number of dealer reductions that have occured. While there are a number of marginal dealers that are still in place, I think there should be at least a plan for replacements before this reckless reduction action is put in place. The structure that Bob Ratliff and the late brilliant John Shumejda put in place was a superb global plan that placed geographically strong brands in their respective markets and sharing their best technologies. Recognize Fendt as market leader in Germany and share its superb CVT with North American leader AGCO Tractors, recognize Valtra as South American market leader and share its superb engine technology with Western European market leader Massey Ferguson etc. This makes all global markets win. The current ideas seem to focus on forcing the selected brands on all areas according to Mr. Richenhagens preference. Signals being sent by current management have an eery irony to last days of the Deutz fiasco.

T.lang I guess after that explanation ,a new wife every once in a while is not so bad!!!!lOl If I remember right you live in Minn. I was up through there last weekend,and it looked like you guys really needed a rain. I hope you got some of that,the other night. IG

Thanks orange I will do that. IG

I understand that AGCO has changed the dealers terms on tractors. Dealers can no longer afford to put tractors on their lots. Probably why market share is down.

Actually, we're in West Central WI. Extremely dry here too. Been getting some rain the last 2 weeks, but not enough to break the drought. lots of corn burned right to the top - won't amount to much. Beans stunted, but if we continue to get rain, they might pan out.

Hello R.O.M., You mentioned: "Deutz moved in, bought the Allis combine division, but Fiat bought the industrial division which to Deutz's surprise and dismay owned the rights to the new Gleaner down front thresher and separator system which later showed up briefly in some laverda combine pamphlets." Would this have meant that Duetz had no choice BUT to discontinue production of the conventionalsIJ

The AC convential configuration had been around for a long time and was well covered by patents. The down front rotary type configuration would have been covered by a new set of patents and would not have had any bearing on the production of the conventials. I think that AC by that stage had moved their conventials production to Mexico which turned out to be a bit of a disaster from the quality control aspect. In the late eighties, sometime after I had been told of Deutz's angst over discovering that the AC industrial division actually owned the down front rotary design, our local AC agent showed me a laverda combine pamphlet [ laverda was Fiat owned ] that had a cutaway illustration of the down front rotary thresher, cage and separator with the material being dropped outside of the lH wheel and a long elevator taking the threshed material up to the sieves. I have never heard what eventually happened to this design but I would suspect that the configuration was not particularly stable due to the very long distance in front of the wheels and weight distribution problems that the down front design imposed. A possible alternative wide wheel design would have made the combine impossibly wide to road transport By way of explanation as to how I acquired some of this info. AC were a small but very well respected player in the Australian Ag industry in the 1970's and early eighties. Australia's ag industries are very small when compared to the USA. Even today we only have a 130.000 farms of all types in Australia, with 99% of those farms being family owned. [ Australia's current total wheat acreage would fit inside of Kansas so why do you guys worry about competition from Australia ! ] Being a small player the Australian AC executives were on a first name basis with most of their customers in Australia and the good AC customers often got inside information that probably was not readily available to the average American customer. As an example, after one of our annual 3 day Ag machinery field days, I and one or two other AC customers had dinner one night with world sales manager for Duetz and 3 or 4 former AC executives soon after Deutz took over AC. It was in situations like this that a lot of info was acquired particularly if you were a long standing and good customer. Again, the local agents, being relatively few in number got a lot of inside info through their close relationship with the very small AC executive unit in Australia. A lot of this info was also passed onto good customers. Even items such as when an Australian group of Gleaner agents had a look at a JD rotary prototype in a small and obscure location in the USA. JD had a spilt flow configuration into a Gleaner type cross body rotor with the discharge to both sides. Something that is still regularly brought up as a solution to larger capacity. The trouble was that JD could not get even flow into both sides of the thresher_ separator. Most or all the material would go to either one side or the other. A similar problem to what Sperry New Holland also had with their first twin rotors out here in Australia in very light crops. Apologies for the long post. Just memories of an old man who has seen a lot of the world go by. And as my friends tell me, it won't be long and I will be hiding my own Easter eggs!!

After reading about the problems with past split flow designs and uneven feeding to either side of the rotor, I began to think of a way to prevent this. The idea I came up with was to split the entire feeding system, right down to the head. Have the left side of the heads feed the left side of a divided feederhouse and the same on the right side. I don't think this would be that difficult or expensive to accomplish. Any comments or potential problems anyone can think ofIJ

After reading ROM's post I had the same idea. But there must be a reason it doesn't work, although I don't know what it would be.