Combines rotor evaluations

[Rolf]

Kurt Only run with the front cover off, as it leaves less martial built up there near the front of cab. duck tapeIJ If your thinking around air tubes, No! thats proper air flex tube with hose clamps around them and would you believe! chimney ducting used as the air ducts! I cant think of were we are using duck tape! Got a bit of rain yesterday afternoon, interestingly was if I had the standard rotor I would have pulled out the moment the window got wet, with Bison (and I was testing some!) all that happened was I got slower and boost pressure climbed up to 26 lbs from 18-20lbs, no slugging and rumbling! only got a further 200 meters down the run as compared to a standard rotor, but it was interesting. Rolf

 

[dumfrmr]

See you have modified the gearbox end of your Bison with a cone. Why for you do thatIJ WrapingIJ Or do you just like to mess with stuff like I doIJIJIJIJIJIJIJIJ When you think about the threashing elements on the Bison what do you think of their action compared to the action of Gleaner type rasp barsIJ After running a season on the Bison only the first half of the rasp portion before the "bar" was polished. The bar was a little rounded and well polished, making me think that the bar does all of the thrashing. When harvesting hard to thrash wheat I run concave tight. The rasp type then will rake the kernals out of the head as it passes over the concave grate. I don't think the bar on the Bison rotor can thrash in the same manner. Your thoughts please!!

 

[R_O_M]

Only about a hundred Ha's [ 250 acres! ] harvested in a very light lentil crop so far, notsodumfrmr! The cone on the gearbox end of the Bison is the idea of JR, the Gleaner modifier nonpariel in NE Victoria, Aust. In the standard Bison, dust and dirt builds up in the corner of the drive plate and the overhang of the cylinder and then wears into the bottom of the gearbox. JR's gearbox had very nearly been worn through into the bottom gearbox bearing casting after one season's operation. Very, very expensive it this is worn through. JR came up with the idea of a cone here to both allow dust and dirt to slide off and to reinforce the end thresher sections. It works real good with no dirt collected there at all so far. However, I think a much simpler solution would have been to cut out the cylinder back close to the drive plate between each of the 4 thresher bar section holders on the gearbox end. This will stop dirt accumulating under the cylinder overhang. Then weld folded V shaped reinforcing sections under each of the 4 threshing section mounts and onto the drive plate so that they comfortably clear the gearbox and slide dirt off as well. Much simpler and no need to cut and fit the end thresher segments. On threshing, we will have to wait until we get into our not so good wheat before we can give an opinion on the thresher segments. I personally think that the segments should be about double their present length as we had experience with a IH speciality rotor with the very small peg thresher segments that just broke the heads of our Australian wheats in half and fed them out through the chopper. 90% on the ground. 10% in the grain box if you could find the grains in the MOG in the box. The IH rotary did not hardly move for about ten days. The N7 was wiping off about 300 tonnes a day. I took pity on the guy, told him his combine would never work in our wheats with that peg set up and then I designed and drew up [ in chalk on my bench top! No record but that is another story! ]] a long bar mounting to fit across the the pegs and which was bolted onto the pegs and mounted a convential rasp bar. The American IH combine owner built the bits as I drew them and installed them in a day or so and away he went like a cut cat. From nowhere to a very good performing machine. I think the present threshing segments in the Gleaner at least, are just too short and material can flow around them too easily. Double their length and you would have a much better threshing system. The Bison threshing segment design is an interesting design and ties in with what I learn't harvesting an extraordinarily tough podded pasture species called medics. Just wish I would have thought of it and yes I _ we [as in Rolf,] just like messing with and trying new ideas!

 

[NDDan]

Just so you know notsodumfrmr and others that received Bisons from me. The spiral grooves in rotor skin, four little fan blades near coupling, and scraper for top right corner of gearbox will prevent any dust buildup from rubbing on gearbox case. This was done on all but the first four production Bisons I put out. Info to get this done ASAP on the first four was taken care of. I believe I also located all the earlier Bisons that were kind of sold out the back door of manufaturer. Hopefully they did the update as I prescribed. I also did my best to get info from these guys on a few things about their Bisons. I then made suggestions on how best to bring their Bisons as close as posible to production specs. Now as far as my attempt to prevent wear on gearbox: The little fan blades don't do much so will be left out in the future. The spiral grooves in conjunction with scraper works as long of scraper doesn't wear to much. I found more wear than I would like on a machine that logged about 7000 acres of wheat. It had worn the mild steel scraper to the point it started to wear on gearbox. This prompted me to hard surface scraper that was sent along with the last few Bisons. I will try get hardened scrapers to anyone with Bison and hopefully they will install prior to logging 500 hours or 7000 acres. Now if you knew JR in Australia you would know he is very similiar to Rolf and ROM. JR was informed of the need to upgrade drive end to prevent gearbox wear. He looked over our plans and decided to go the extra mile to eliminate a need for scraper that could need attention over time. JRs cone design and a few other ideas are actively being looked at. Ideally we would like to eliminate the need for scraper all together. Preliminarly the cone is working good on a couple machines in Australia and I believe they might have a couple other ideas that might get tested yet this year. Anyway I thought I needed to tell you guys with Bisons that you don't need to get so worried as long as you check condition of scraper before logging to many acres and let me know if you have rotor out and I haven't got a hard scraper to you yet.

 

[Rolf]

Thanks Dan Good info! Bison work very well, can't cut the lentils any faster than about 7 km_hr, due to Cary no chokes that are very worn and double cut knife sections getting tired as well, temporary fix was this morning I used a cut off grinding wheel to lightly grind each fingers edge to give it a nice square edge for knife section to slice against, seems to have made a difference with a nicer cut job been done Rom court the sieve shaker box rubbers from been worn down to the point of breaking that sieve box cast sleeve! all in time before destroying the sieve box. Rolf

 

[NDDan]

OK now with 29 if not 30 years of production Gleaner rotors. Things have changed but same basic inovative design has stayed the same. Same old fair weather reputation still lingers. This is far from the truth any more especially if some of the enhancements have been done. I see no reason to reinvent the wheel if the wheel is working fine but then again if it can be refined to roll easier go for it. I'll reflect on a few thing we have done to make the Gleaners roll easier. Most of our efforts have been to flow edible bean straw at very slow cylinder bar tip speeds and not hurt performance in high tip speed crops. Seems most everything we did for beans only helped other crops and this being even more evident these days with green straw and ripe seeds. Hard to put percentage on some of this stuff for alot of our operators are one machine operations. I can say we went from absolute no go to going even when conventionals couldn't. I'll try touch base on what we did over time to keep our Gleaner rotors performing like the outstanding reputation of the Gleaner conventionals. From the beginning to 1990 we found a few things to get these machines up to speed in tougher conditions. The eight bar 25" rotor with wider and milder rasps as compared to conventional were working well but helicals were not doing the job. So the first thing we did was to install channel iron helical kit that Gleaner put out and advertised as edible bean and green sunflower kit. I only wish we would of dared to leave this kit in for our other crops earlier on. For the fear that we couldn't do other crops we were removing and replacing between crops. We then started shimming standard flat iron helicals with 1_4" flat iron as well as installing Gleaners green stem kit (this was kit that neatly hooked up steep pitch thresher helicals to shallower pitch seperator helicals at three loctions). We also added mounts for two additional discharge paddles when doing these enhancements. This got use back in the combine business and we continued experimenting with removal of reverse cylinder bars and installing stationary rasp bars ect to maintain straw flow while preventing loses. Gleaner put out a corn door kit which as basically three or four of the removable cage doors that were made of 1"X1 1_4" holes instead of 1"X1" holes. These doors were to reduce posible corn losses. One must remember our main competition was with a company that only had conventionals and many of them operators with them didn't give a rip about the good crop going over the walkers. Oh what we would of had if Gleaner would of put a 60" down front cylinder in there conventional along with accelerator rolls!!! First P3s came out with a shorter 25" eight bar rotor with 1_2" wide rasp bars. These bars were similiar to bars used on the old conventionals. These P3s had more crossbars in concave and larger holes in cage. These small P3 equiped machines were out for two or three years prior to the large machines going with P3. We were still a bit afraid of trading the guys out of there Gleaner conventional into these machines for the reason of edible beans. Ends up R50 was an excellant edible bean machine right off the get go as long as it had the chrome helical bars. It made a perfect step up in our crops for the l owners. large P3s came out for 1990 production of R60-70s. These large P3s were basically a copy of small P3 with a wider concave and longer cylinder. We strugled with these in our edible beans and tough conditions for two reason. First was they used same angle helicals as small P3s had which caused large amount of allready threshed crop to go over feeder and concave area a second time. Second was the longer rotor only used one more row of the same cylinder bars that the small P3 had which did not get the rasp close enough to area just ahead of discharge. Without the rasp working with helical to get the material to discharge we ended up with a dead spot. Gleaner came out with the wide rasp bar (3_4") a couple years after the large P3s came out. This was an effort to flow the tough material better. We found the main improvement was to get the cylinder bars extended to discharge which Gleaner made an option for a couple years and then factory standard sometime after 2000. I understand cages are now punched for steep thresher helicals in '08. Gleaner also made rear half (top) thresher concave high wide wire in '96. Gleaner made seperator grate adjustable in '97. Gleaner came out with a high wide wire seperator grate as an option. Gleaner has option of narrow rasp bars over concave and wide on seperator side. I'm missing a few things but needed to point out they didn't or have not exactly stood still. Most recent CDF rotor has been just the ticket in many conditions for some guys and may need refining for others. Don't think there will ever be a rotor of any color that is best for everyone in every crop and condition. Now as an effort to bring the standard Gleaner eight bar up another level in edible beans we tried about everything from twice the number of factory helicals which were steep pitch all the way threw to shimming the steep channel helicals by 1_4" to complete rotor with 1.5" between the rasps to blanking off top of concave with solid sheet. You might say none of this did the trick and then we blacksmithed a set of rotor sweeps. This worked perfect right off the get go and we have refined to just how many sweeps we can have installed for all our crops. Some guys (about a dozen) have made themselves what we call a supersweep rotor. This is a rotor with only a few cylinder bars and mostly sweeps. They fly threw edible beans and green sunflowers with eaze with the best samples. They simply swap rotors between early and late crops. Most common standard set of sweeps on seperator side of rotor will go threw green or damp material noticeably easier than standard eight bar with all forward extended bars. Sweeps will also help prevent breaking up cobs and the tender dry straws which reduces shoe load. Numerous reports of the smoothest operation ever in green material. Now as far as the Bison. I don't have any further experience of comparing it to CDF or aftermarket rotors than you likly have allready read. More will surely come with time. I will say it does have edge over standard sweep equiped machine at times. It does appear it has more trouble with the toughest to thresh wheat but did not get compared head to head with Gleaner eight bar in them conditions yet. A couple head to head reports I have is R75 equiped with Bison and 36' mac don running with R72 equiped with sweeps pushing 30' mac don in green wheat straw yeilding 120-140bu ac. R75 has a few more HP but it was running 4mph while R72 was at 3mph. It had rained and there was basically no growth behind Bison while R72 had low amount. This was very tough going and both machines can speed up quite alot when dry. Several reports of just running up to edge of clean grain capacity for the moisture of the corn and accurate seed count loss from spreader droped was found to be five to ten kernals per running foot. For the size head and yeilds they were running they were easily below 1_4% of the yeild. I won't say this is allways posible but it is some reports I have received. Soybean reports have been nothing but faster than before, less loss than before, mostly just drive as fast as head will cut. Sunflowers flow threw better than ever and maybe only supersweep would be better. Bison prefered hands down for local grass operation over standard Gleaner eight bar that had all forward bars and two sets of standard sweeps on seperator side. So you see it's not hard for me to see a future with the Gleaner Natural Flow. I must now go have a rest. Take care Gleaner fans

 

[R_O_M]

We are in a poor lentil crop with Bison Rotor revs at about 200 - 210 RPM. Crop is only yielding probably .6 tonnes _ Ha or a little better which we are happy to get as until we got a late rain, we possibly were not going to harvest a crop. We have some weeds which were particularly bad in a couple of acre patches and which are semi-green and are naturally very wiry and extremely tough. These weeds are wrapping in considerable quantities around the stem of the T peg that sweeps the lH edge of the concave. looks like a mod for next season coming up to overcome this peg stem wrapping. Probably a couple of very short sweeps mounted on the end of the large cylinder and between the thresher segment mountings to sweep the end of the concave clear and the replacement of the T peg with a standard peg. [ As I understand, the Bison has apparently had a problem here previously which led to the incorporation of the T peg to sweep the concave end clear. ] The T peg and the rest of the pegs are all set at a trailing 30 degree angle. The standard pegs are staying clean as any material wrapping around the pegs can slide off over the smooth bend of the peg. Bending the pegs over instead of welding or casting with a sharp right angle at the top may have saved some grief as the smooth bend allows material to slide off. A sharp angle here would have possibly trapped material around the peg stems. Preliminary but we may also build thresher segments that will carry short sections of the more convential rasp bars. These will overlap the preceding and trailing segments to reduce the effects of material flow around between the segments without actually being threshed which we suspect is happening, particularly in the very light crops. Bloody amazing how the Bison equipped R62 just smoothly works it's way through a couple of patches of these green wiry weeds that would have had a standard rotor equipped machine just about destroying itself if it didn't block up first! All this with the engine barely changing note or the boost gauge rising by more than a couple of psi.