NDDan
Guest
The guys at Sand iron and steel build them. They are twenty miles from me. I helped them size them up to fit the Gleaner. We ran the very first proto type that was Gleaner on thresher side and Bison (twisted pegs)on seperator side. We also ran second proto type design that used spiraled beater bars on thresher side and twisted pegs on seperator side. Four more of the second proto type design were distributed from SE North Dakota to Nebraska to Iowa. All rotors worked very well with basically no crop loss in wheat and soybeans. We run a few edible beans where it worked fine. Another guy ran edibles and it didn't do so good but he was comparing to a super sweeped rotor taking in massive amount. It was tried in sunflower that were extremly wet and again it couldn't match a highly specialized super sweeped rotor. It will take some more time to get more fair comparison against more all purpose rotors. I believe one of them got into a couple other crops also including canola but I have to check with that guy. Only problem with that second proto design is it would lose corn while in low yeilds. I worked with Sand and owner of Bison design to make a couple changes for corn. First of the third proto design went to SE North Dakota to thresh some corn that sat over winter. Not a good test but they ran up to 10 MPH with 830 head and started overrunning the clean grain at about 7.5MPH. Three of the third proto designs threshed wheat from Texas to North Dakota with a claimed 20% fuel savings per acre over the 25" six bar rotors he was running. Production rotors changed very little from third proto type. Eight production rotors run corn and soybeans and only one gave trouble. The one that gave trouble was installed in early P3 used in R60 and 70s. That P3 has double the helicals in transition area and is otherwise very similar to later P3s. I'm thinking that is just two many helicals running to close to Bison beater bar design. Corn was all done before that dawned on me. I did not get a CDF in time to run against the Bison or to even try in anything this year. No other Bison was put against a CDF either. Maybe next year. I don't know of anyone that will part with Bison except maybe the one in early P3 if it don't work for them with helicals spaced a decent distance for next year. One Bison did run all the soybeans along with standard eight bar Gleaner with I believe two sets of my sweeps He called sweep rotor a poor mans Bison. He run the sweep machine a little in corn which worked fine but took off 95% with Bison machine. You can find Sands at www.partsman.com