Holy s++t, the cams, levers, bearings. How in the he77 do you even adjust something like that, better yet, who designs it. I consider myself fairley mechanically minded but I would run far away if I had to work on that LOL.
The farm that I live on is being split up into 4 pastures for livestock. I don't plan on baling anything here. The farm that I want to do hay is an hour away. That's where the cows are right now, but once I get them here, I'll start removing the mesquite trees and working on getting it ready to bale hay. Option one is to hire a guy to bale it. Current prices are about $30 per bale for them to come there and do all the work. That's better then what I'm paying for hay right now. I might just do that forever and never get into baling it myself, but I hate being dependent on others. They have a way of not always being there when I need them, and their prices will always go up over time. If I decide to buy, I'll probably go to my Massey Ferguson dealer and do a package deal for everything brand new. Somehow, I think that will be more expensive then paying a guy $30 a bale. Maybe I'll get lucky and find somebody that wants to bale it and split the bales so I get what I need for free, and he takes the rest away. It's still a few years away, so I'm just in the thinking stage more then anything else.
I had assumed that it was your brothers place but was unaware that you planned on eventually bringing them home.
I, too am experiencing that drudgery.
Wow, those knotters make me shudder! Is that 4 hydraulic motors per knotter? Suddenly the old round baler with the manually guided twine feed seems not to bad! But I think you might be still baling if your used that, as I don't think it comes close the tonnage per hour the big square baler does when its happy... Interesting though to see the insides of a big square baler.So today started off fine. Stacked a bunch of bales in fields baled earlier in the week. This is a way of keeping busy until the sun burns off the morning dew.
About 12 I headed up to our current customers site and began raking for about 2 hours. By 2 I was ready to bale. Made a few bales, then got an error code. All 6 bale strings broke on the tie cycle. This has NEVER happened to me with this baler. Usually this means the bar that controls all the twine fingers has broken or twisted.
Here you can see the twine fingers are not all aligned the same direction Under the knotters. They all need to be in alignment.
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I tried to do a couple manual tie cycles and see if it would clear and watch the twine fingers at the same time. They were jammed. I spent the next 2 hours of precious afternoon sun messing with it. Each time it mis-tied, I had to manually thread the top 6 knotters and bottom 6 needles. I took out a pry bar and tried to manually roll the bar that controls the twine fingers back.
I was on my last few tries, said a little prayer and asked my maker for some help. Low & behold, the twine fingers reset themselves.
Below you can see the twine fingers are all in the “home” position and all swung to the right.
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I still don’t know what broke, or what I fixed. LOL. Sometimes you get the bear. Sometimes the bear gets you, right?
Well, I ended up finishing with a nice 20MPH breeze and got the fields all baled. Thank the Lord because tomorrow we are getting a tropical cyclone (Whatever that is) with 6” of rain.
Here I am rounding up and stacking bales at dusk again. I need a beer (or 12).
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When it’s running properly, you can rake 3 rows together and it will eat them at 5-6 MPH for several hours.
