Combines rotor evaluations

This might give a bit of an idea of what our combine looks like with lentil paddle reel and air manifold on the front, You can see cut lentils in the foreground, this was about three years ago, not much has changed on the outside! Rolf

Dan,ya gotta quit talking this Bison rotor thing up sooo much, you're starting to get under the enclosed rotor guys skin. They're gonna doubt your expertise (sp) in knowledge of transverse machines. Aw heck, the cats out of the bag, go for it. I still didn't get the power thing figured out on my 62, wasn't there a place in Iowa that guys were sending pumps to that was excelentIJIJ

Don't worry. I've talked to all these guys over time and we have never shared bad words. We have all had our growing pains with proto types. I admire everything they have done to help out the Gleaner while hopefully making a decent living. If I would of know St. John had some sort of sweep in the works basically at the same time I was I would of likely been at his door waiting to take a proto home. If I would of know Gleaner had the CDF in the works I might not of got hooked up fitting a Bison. If I didn't know what the sweeps were doing for the standard Gleaner eight bar I wouldn't of crafted some for the Sunnybrook gen 2. Recent conversation with Sunnybrook to share idea of sweeps on their rotor led them to build there own protos. My thoughts were this is much better way to wake up as many Gleaners as posible in there part of the world. We also tried hard to get some proto sweeps for CDF going this year. Anyway your right the cats out of the bag and best info will be coming as time goes on. This info may be in small spurts as machines get to run side by side in exact crop and condition. Then of course weighting in all the other varibles between the machines to analize if it is rotor or some other varible. I don't know if you got my email on hypers favorite pump station. I believe you can find address over in hyper upgrades. Did you find out when machine was dynoed if they took RPM and torque reading at mainshaft at 100 engine RPM below rated and then again at 200 RPM below ratedIJ Don't know if I would bother if they didn't for pump is easy enough to R+R for a tune up at hypers favorite pump shop. They could likely tell you how pump was performing before any fine tuning. Best of luck

Nice to see some of your proto stuff is now in production. I like the pictures of seperator grate with cross bars removed. Did you ever run it that way with sweepsIJ This didn't help save some of the crops up north and in fact made rotor loss worse while increasing shoe load. This was well before sweeps or Bison. I feel this may be just the ticket for multiple load and conditions as long as wires are close enough to top of cross bars. Recent conversation with hyper on grates he has made for P1s has wires located no more than 1_4" below crossbars. All the best and have a safe harvest.

Dan, would the cut outs in the cage door be too much opening for wheat and beansIJIJ I was going to pull the door off and put the hockey sticks back, as first recieved, and helicals back in plus pull the corn ring back out. Any thoughts.

Observations from this fall would be similar to those below. With a Bison and steep pitch helicals over thresher power is not really an issue any more. It is just about that simple. In soybeans, you can run this thing as slow as you want, perhaps even too slow, and it just flows right through. In corn, we need to tweak our machine a little. loss was similar to what we had with our modified stock rotor, but again, we could run it as slow as we wanted to. I'm sure if we do what we should with the seperator grate (cage material, or bigger slots and a few missing helicalsIJIJ) we will have virtually no loss. Outstanding improvement to a combine we were already very happy with. Hmmm, now it needs a bigger bean head....but then it really needs tilt.

let me put it this way. At least one guy went back into very green nasty beans with setup just like you except he had my proto corn door installed. He had the short shoe and worked the 62 hard with pegs turned for corn and rings installed. He said he had no shoe overload problem at all. So what I would suggest to you is remove corn rings, turn pins as received, might even leave helicals off door. Then when getting close to corn harvest be ready with chopper blade for hand held grinder. Before you turn pins back to so called corn position cut the door and give it a try. You can easily install the corn rings if needed. I think this will work without having to turn the pins. Good luck

Tom Heres a picture of lentils and our Combo pack of lentil reel and air manifold! I'd sure like to see AGCO to produce and make a instruction book for this !!!IJIJ! Rolf

Ripe lentil pods shatter from the vine very easily when being harvested. Flex headers are used exclusively for lentil harvesting. The lentil Reel is a length of 8" tubing with 3 of 6" wide rubber blades fastened on to sweep the lentils off of the knife. The lentil Reel hangs from the normal reel arms and is driven by the reel motor via a chain drive down the lentil Reel hangers. As with the standard reel, the lentil reel can be raised, lowered, moved forward and back and change speed. The air manifold blows lentil vine and seed off the knife and is an assist to the lentil reel action. The air manifold is independent of the reel. It can be raised, lowered, fore and aft movement and tilted, all of on the go by switches in the cab. Without these items, knife losses can be very high and in very short dry or drought season lentils, a standard full size Reel is a very useless piece of machinery as the crop losses at the knife bar in very short crops are a very high percentage of the potential yield. Our combo set up of lentil reel and Air manifold is probably the only one in captivity and reduces seed losses from the knife by a very big margin.

Nice pictures. I see that you have duct tape (or gleaner weld) there also. Do you run without the cover shield on you feeder houseIJ Or was it just off for the pictureIJ Kurt