Combines macdon vs JD

Hum..... So in your opinion If you ran a new 2388 and you wanted 36ft And its just for beans What should i get...(like brand and stuff) Just curious our 1020 grain head kinda finally bit the dust this past harvest after a hard life and many bean's

I would get a 635 Hydraflex only problem would be getting the active hydraulic to work correctly if you could do that the hydraflex head is the way to go in my opnion.

I have not heard a good word about the Hydraflex.

So even if your ground would be fairly flat to run a draper in soybeans, you would still buy a $50,000 JD draper and another maybe $50,000 flex head, if you could do it with one $30,000 MacDon 963 IJIJIJ How many Dollars worth of beans would you be getting more with the flex headIJ

Well first off there is no place flat enought for a draper header to work good and get all the beans like a flex head will except in the Red River Valley in Eastern ND or Western Minnesota where there is sometimes only 6-10 inches drop in a mile and even there draper header don't work very good because the soil is very sticky, Secondly I have never priced out a new JD Draper head so I do not know what they cost but I have bought 2 new 635 Hydraflex one in 2004 and another one for this year 2005 and I will guarantee they do not cost 50,000 just a little bit over 1_2 of that well get you a pretty well equiped 635 Hydraflex that will do a better job cutting beans that any draper head out there now if you are going to combine several thousand acres of wheat and only 100 acres of beans then maybe it is not worth is for what you will save but if you are harvesting a lot of acres of beans the better cut, and ability to "hug" the ground will pay for itself over time and one more thing I really like having auto header height on the flex head just push the button once and drive very rarely do I ever touch the button again until I get to the other end of the field.

Believe it or not, where we cut beans, the difference between flex and draper is hardly noticeable. I had both of them in the same field. Auto header height and auto ground pressure is possible on drapers, too. Just what I have seen from MacDon on that perspective hasn't worked well. But it could be made to work easily. It would be interesting to have both heads in a field and do a loss count to actually figure the dollar difference and how many years it takes to pay for the extra flex head. Maybe I remember it this fall.

Since you seem convinced that draper headers are the answer for harvesting beans I am just going to give up trying to change your mind you will realize some day that they are not the answer but tell then who knowsIJIJ All I can go by is what I have seen from local guys running draper heads one guy had a 36' Macdon draper on a 9600 it worked OK if conditions where good, ground was dry and smooth but there still left enough beans out there in my opnion then we got a wet fall were it rained every couple of days absolutely misserable for cutting beans and up here in North Dakota you all realize it is going to snow pretty soon when it is the middle of October they ended up driving to someplace in Illinois to get a 930 Flex head because that was one of the few heads to be found in the US at the time (this was about 7-8 years ago) it worked 100 times better and they swore they would never use a draper header again. Fast forward about 5 years these guys bought a CAT combine (first mistake in my opnion) but anyways the first year ran a 30' Cat flex head it worked great except they said it was not big enough to keep the machine full so now Macdon has what they call a flex-draper sounds great so they buy one and we get another one of those miserable falls for harvesting beans and guess what, that head won't work no matter what they do they ended up going back to a 30 flex and also hiring 1_2 they combing done because they got so far behind screwing around with the Macdon draper header trying to make it work they never got anything done last fall so now I think they have the problem solved for next year they have a new 9860STS and a 635 Hydraflex on order for the 2005 harvest

Your right. Nothing beats a flex head in pulse crops. Thats what they're made for. Drapers are the next best thing under the proper conditions. Anyone try the new 974 Macdon Flex draper head yetIJ Best of both worlds perhaps.

Don't get me wrong there are surely conditions, like you are describing, where the flex head outperforms the draper by far. Then you don't have much of a choice. We just have been lucky to have ground and weather conditions where we got along fine without owning the extra flex head.

Have driven STS with 936D and can't see the sickle when hugging the ground. Almost have to stand to see what your doing the sickle is so far forward.