Combines Specialty rotor pros and consIJ

What crops will you be running inIJ

Corn and soybeans and possibly very little wheat once in a while.

The common wisdom is that the conventional rotor works better in corn and the specialty rotor works better in beans. However, I think it might be more accurate to say the specialty works better in beans and the conventional is more difficult to set in corn. I think the Gorden bars may help the specialty performance in corn if too many cobs are getting broken. Most consider the specialty the way to go and will pay a little more for one. In an older machine you will want to see if any straight separator bars have been installed. It would not have had them from the factory.

I currently have a Gleaner rotor and have fought broken cobs for years. I really like the capacity of my current machine and like the low mounted cab and good visibility better than the red ones but my closest dealer (15mi) stocks very few parts and charges full list price (which for AGCO is quite high). There are a couple of decent dealers around but they are both over an hour away. There is a decent IH dealer about 10 minutes away and a very good one about 45 min. away so I'm looking at convenience as much as anything. Also Sloan X-press is about 10 min. away and carries many aftermarket IH parts. What about diff. between IH and Cummins eng. IJ

Fundamentally, I think you are giving up some threshing ability by going red. The Gleaner bars are simply more aggressive than anything CIH offers. To fix that, we just put in a St. John raspbar rotor in a 2188. It uses the Gleaner style bar and will hopefully let us handle down, damp wheat straw better. In your case, where corn and soybeans are your major crops, you will probably get along just fine with the specialty rotor. As for the two engines, the IH has a reputation of being economical and dependable. The Cummins gives the machine significantly more capacity. I guess it kind of depends on how critical harvesting speed is to your operation. One thing that you will enjoy about the red combines is that the factory builds in backwards compatibility whenever possible. You can make a lot of updates if you need to.