Combines What header is best for R72

We harvest grain from Oklahoma-Canadian line. Started out with auger headers. Went to 36' Macdons in 91 then in 95 ran prototype agco 37', Ran 37'Agco 96-last part of 99. Put auger headers on ran them till last part of wheat harvest this year. If you harvest in good conditions all the time and don't ever get into rocks Agco's 700 header does pretty well. The second year we couldn't keep them running though. Wobble-boxes,sickle drive pins,sickles Everything kept failing. Their draper header has sickle drive problems, they have improved them but we could still stall the new shumacker drive in tough conditions and being hydrolic drive you don't just hit the reverser. We went back to 30' Macdons this year so hoping not to have wobble-box and sickle trouble. Agco has better warranty than Macdon but Macdon has better engineers working on their draper heads in my opinion. We used to get in bad conditions with that 37' agco header and all 4 machines would sit around the feild with their headers up sickle plugged all the time. Call the main engineer at Hesston and he'd say that just don't compute. And we had the same trouble year after year. Thats my 2 cents worth.. Chet

We ran two R72,s this year with 36'macdons and they did Ok but we had trouble feeding in some conditions. The problem was the center draper was to narrow and would bunch up. and most the time had to be hand dug out. we traded for 30' honeybees they have a wider center draper and we can get fore and aft reel adj. Macdon didn't offer that for Gleaners

MacDon does make a wider center belt, B4244 that is 45" instead of 38"; They also have Hyd fore and aft just as they have hyd tilt on maxci-float to header.

Another option offered on MacDon now is a retractable finger drum, essentially makes the 871 become an 872 in the parts book. Whole goods number B4242.

I saw that you traded to 30ft heads. WhyIJ We thought we could be more productive with 36ft. With our 30ft heads ground speed is a limitation in lighter grain. I ran a JD 30ft draper on a 9650 for a few days in heavy wheat (120 bu.) and had the center belt plug often.( at least 8 or 10 times) I thought it was just JD,s problem. John Deere's rep called service, ajusted and tinkered but couldn't fix it.

I'm with you on the Agco 700 header. They proform well. You just better have some parts around after 5000 acres. If we run ours again it will be the fourth year. Thanks for your input.

Strawboss,we ran a 30 ft honeybee this year with mac-dons and jd drapers and it seemed to do the best job cutting close to the ground. The wide center belt is a real plus in heavy crops (6 to 7 tonnes per hectre)we had no plugs at all.The hydraulic knife drive is very smooth(hopefully long life)the JD's had some problems there.The auger with retractable fingers seems to work very well too agains't just a beater feeding in.Of course this is just my observations in Australian conditions,yours could very well be different.The worst thing is trying to grease the uni joints, not always easy.john

We seldom see light crops. In heavy crops the 36' hdr. just is to much. We also seemed to have more feed chain trouble with the bigger hdr. Make no mistake in ligt wheat there unbeatable. Were going to try the shorter honeybees in soybeans

Was wondering the same thing. In my case an R70 (p1),wheat, oats, barley, peas, yields generally 1-2 tonnes_acre. lots of 30 ft. Honeybees on TR97-98, C-IH 2188 and JD 9600 in this area. Guys really like their Honeybees, even if they have somewhat questionable taste in thresher. The Honeybee seems like quite a load on the front end. I'm sure my neighbor steers his 2188 with his wheel brakes. He had to add ballast to the rear tires. Should I expect to do the same on my GleanerIJ Has anyone compared the weght of a Honeybee to a Macdon or an AGCOIJ

I was just wondering why you decided to go with 30' and not back to 36' headersIJ Also what makes the AGCO warranty better than the Macdon warrantyIJ