Combines Tailings Return Modification

Agreed. What about a readout of the volume of material in the return or a sample of the material. Which would be more useful to set the machineIJ How much would we pay for that capabilityIJ I'll show my ignorance here but what do the other colors have along this lineIJ

A tailings return like the l2 had, A C12 Cat Engine, and Mobile-tracks would make the R75 a nearly perfect machine. In the interim, I'd settle for an l2 type return though. A glance out the window showed the volume of stuff going over the sieve. Reach out and grab a handful, and you could see what it was, and make adjustments from there. You could control air, cyl. speed, and travel speed to fine tune it, but with an on-the-go concave adjustment and sieve_chaffer opening you would really be able to dial in the proper settings. Another thing I liked about the l2 return was the little slope in the chute, right behind the window. I made a hinge at the bottom of that chute and had a small push rod that let me pull the chute bottom towards me. When I got in a bunch of green weeds, I could dump the return out by just pulling on the rod. When I got through the weeds, a push on the rod would put things back like they were. That simple mod made a real weed-eater out of the machine. Ed in Montana

The new Claas (CATIJ) lexions apparently have an indicator indicating the volume of tailings going through the return system and I know that older Claas combines had a returns-chute that was visible from the cab.

Oh yes, just another comment: a contractor I know had modifications done on his CIH 2388's, basically put a mass-sensor, same as the one for the clean-grain elevator, in the tailings elevator and by doing this it now has a readout of the tailings-volume in the cab, which obviously makes a world of difference to the ease of changing settings and the accuracy of these changes.

Question_comment: The beauty of a rotary combine is that you do not need this feature. If you are doing a good clean job in the bin and are not loosing grain over back of sieves along with not plugging the tailings elevator why would you want something that costs money and does not make you money. I really do not care if the tailings is 10% full or 90% full as long as long as it does not plug and I am geting good performance. I would prefer to keep machine simple and low cost. If a feature does not make money than why have it. Just drive and make money!

Farmer Ed, I grew up running an l3 and used to wish we had the same style return on the 1680. However, since we put the fan deflector in our machines the return volume monitors usually sit on zero. One exception was when we switched bean varieties and the larger beans would not fit through the lower seive until we opened it up a notch. If you get the air flow through the cleaning shoe corrected, I doubt you will get much info from watching the return. Of course, when you get into weeds and the volume goes up, you already know what is in there.

all the space the tailings take up inside your thresher is space that could have been taken up by grain from the header and thus have increased your capacity, methinks.

In some crops the volume and composition of tailings does not matter. But other crops, lentils for example, need a slow and gentle threshing process. The more seed that is repeated thru the thresher via the tailings, the greater the potential seed damage and the greater the chance of down grading or cleaning charges being imposed. The ability to have a visual assessment of the tailings in this case would be invaluable. Cheers!

My experience is that you always run the sieve to the most max opening possible in any crop for max capacity and lowest tailings. This would be dictated by the bin sample the operator is comfortable with. Obviously the wider the sieve you can run is a indication if threshing is being done correctly. So why would I need extra cost or headache with a monitor or visual aidIJ I do not understand lodgic of setting machine to what the load of the tailings elevator is. This must be some type of marketing mojo.

i don't think i'll try to convince you, you clearly believe in your system and i respect that. my personal opinion is that a tailings-monitor is handy. so, let's agree to disagree.