Combines sts concave change

Glen, I've been there before. It only took half that time for me. I'm not saying that I'm that talented, but perhaps I can help you find where the trouble is. What was the main difficultyIJ Did it seem to get a wedgie on the way outIJ Joe

yea it got stuck about halfway out and we realized

Glen, What I had done was to put the rotor in neutral so the concave rolled right out. Also a strategically placed piece of plywood on top of the shoe supply augers made that whole senario work smoother. If I pulled one out and put the same one back in I would'nt think it necessary to readjust. They should mount in there smooth, if one looks a little cockeyed loosen the bolts and re-tighten in the sequence described in the manual. The access doors get easier to install once you've done it a couple times. I never thought of numbering them, good idea. Happy motoring, it is a good combine. Joe

Thanks for the info

HAd 5 STS's. First combine took us 2 hours. By the 5th one we were down to 40 minutes. Thats with 2 guys. lay a cardboard piece over augers and put rotor in N. Take middle out, then take front out. Replace front and snug up bolts. Take rear cave out and replacethen put middle back in. Pretty sure you have to levele rotor after each change. Because you will be changing from round bar to small wire or sometihing like that. They can't all be the same. Bound to be some variations in the welding process. Be a bad bad deal if something came apart in the cave at 1000RPM. leveling is not that hard. Call it cheap insurance.

we want to go from wheat to field peas, similar to beans

We have run small grain in the front, and a couple of other combinations as follows: Small grain in front and then two round bar. In this configuration we have put the snap in inserts in the middle concave and sometimes one in the front section of the rear concave as needed. leaving the back open generally will give us a mile per hour or so in barley and safflower. We have also run small grain in the front two positions and round bar in the third, with inserts as needed. If you switch back and forth from wheat to barley as we do frequently, you might want to consider having solid filler covers made for the round bar (two segment concaves - Deere doesn't make them yet, only for the three segment small grain) This allows you to add them to the center concave when cutting "hard to thresh" wheat and keeps you from having to change concaves. Then to go to barley or beans, you can just pull the covers, move your inserts from the back to the middle. This might not work for beans since you're still probably going to have to change the front, and to do that you have to take out the middle. It does however work great for just wheat, barley, and safflower. We only change the concaves going to corn. Good luck.

We have found that is easier to change the concaves if you clamp the back one to the grates with a couple of vice grips. Not letting that one slide forward after removing the center one makes the job a lot easier.

I feel sorry for you guys that it takes this long to get the concave out. Too bad JD didn't come out with a better set up especially if you want to switch them this much. On my TR99 only takes me about 1_2 hour to change concaves on BOTH rotors. Very nice to work on!