Combines losses on left side

[Brodale]

I'm not a Cat owner but I had the same trouble with my Case a couple years ago. I changed the rotor speed (increased if I remember right) about 50rpm and that changed the distribution across the seive. Was able to increase ground speed with a lot less seive loss. Might work for you too.

 

[Harvester]

Brodale brings up a good point, as rotor(s) speed can greatly affect separation and distribution. What is often of value when encountering a concentrated loss problem like this is doing a 'kill stall' of the combine to determine how the shoe is being loaded and how much trash is present. This is a problem that plagues the NH TR combines in grains and the lexion likely behaves similarly with the smaller high-speed rotors. In dry or regular crop, the rotors over-separate and too much trash is separated and sent to the shoe. I understand that the lexions have blanking plates you can install to block off certain areas of the rotor grates for just this problem, which will reduce the trash load on the shoe and can also shift the material distribution on the shoe one way or the other, to compensate for your particular condition. Good luck.

 

[tobaboy]

Ya we run the filler plates on our rotors, some of them actually never come out. Never done a kill stall, the idea kind of scares me . Next year on our new machine I hope to have the filler plates controlled from the cab, or at least somewhere more convenient then the current set-up; this will allow for more experimentation and fine-tuning, the variable speed rotors will also help with this I believe.

 

[make0905]

do you have the right concarves in front of the APS - if you have problems to overload the chaffer you should reverse the universal concarves and put small wire in then put the fan speed up a bit!

 

[tobaboy]

I'm pretty sure its the small wire concave, the fan is wide open in wheat. We're not disappointed with the combines performance, just wondering if we should be getting more out of it

 

[cornyfarmer]

Bet your concave is not level. If it has many hrs. concave pivit pins are probably wore allowing it to sag on left side.

 

[tobaboy]

The machine had 750 hrs, concave didn't seem to be sagging. This problem seems to be common on lexion rotaries.

 

[make0905]

you should slow down the APS to 650 and open the distance to the concarves - I would not slow down the tines under 600! If you slow down too much the tines were not able to bring away the material from the APS and you will make it full!

 

[canuck]

We have a 480r and it was doing the same thing we checked the concave and it was not level from the factory we checked for level before we started combineing and it was fine but we used it for 50 hours and the machanic had to re level the concave because one side was higher then the other they said we should of ran it up and down a few times after we leveled it.then we had the back 3inches of the sieve plug off untill we bent the steal wind flaps down just under the sieve we had no problems there was no wind getting to the back of the sieve and we gained more speed hope this helps.

 

[tobaboy]

Thanks for the suggestions fellas, here's another thing to consider. Our 480 did it, the 480r we demoed did it, and a friends 470 was doing it. In winter wheat we were travelling about 3.5-4 mph with 36ft. hd, wheat was doing 75bus_ac. The 480 couldn't do much more b_c of power, the 480r could do 4.5 no prob but then the "strip" would show up. I'm not convinced the problem is with the concave or with wind, it just seems that as these machines get overloaded its a strip on the left hand side of the sieve that shows up first. If this problem could be figured out, then you could unleash some serious capacity.