5/23/2010

Kings County - here we are!

Hello Followers,

I'm in Kings County now, and the last days were really busy. We had 5 demonstrations and I baled two days together with 3 competitor balers in the field nearby Corcoran. And that's the first thing I wanted to tell you about. When I came over to Corcoran on Friday 14th the customer asked me, if I would like to bale that evening with him. We had changed the tractor in the morning - I run the JCB 8250 Fastrac again - and so I decided that it is a good opportunity to check all the settings and adjustments of the baler. The hitch of the JCB is a little bit higher as the hitch of the CASE Puma, and I was not sure, if it is not too high for the Pick Up. So I went out to the field in the evening, and I made some nice heavy bales side by side with the competitor balers. It was interesting for me to see the performance of the Hesston balers - they were slower and the density was not as good as at the Krone baler. This picture I took the next morning showes you very well how much more efficient the Krone baler is.
In the middle of the picture you can see a windrow the competitor baler baled. You can see 5 bales in that row. Left beside that windrow is a row I baled with the Krone baler with 1-2 mph more speed. You can see 2 bales, and one more was at the end of the windrow before.

Here another spot in the field, but the same picture - My windrow has less bales than the competitor windrow.
I also weight some bales with my balescale in the front hitch, and the results were the same like the pictures tell you:
The other bales had the following weights:
1411 lbs; 1546 lbs; 1340 lbs; 1411 lbs; 1411 lbs; 1367 lbs; 1368 lbs; 1565 lbs; 1455 lbs; 1521 lbs
Average was 1439 lbs

Our Krone bales had the following weights:
1896 lbs; 1786 lbs; 1870 lbs; 1720 lbs; 1808 lbs; 1720 lbs; 1852 lbs; 1962 lbs
Average was 1831 lbs
We made 8 ft. bales Alfalfa Hay with 8-13% moisture

It was also very nice to see the difference while baling. When the baler on my side dropped a bale, I looked how long my actual bale was - for example 70 inch in the bale chamber. When he dropped his next bale, I looked again to my monitor, and it showed me most of the time that my actual bale was 45 to 50 inch long. So I knew exactly, that I had 20-25% more material in my bale. And that with 2 mph more speed and with only 65% plungerforce. 

Here is a picture of alle balers side by side at the end of the day.

I baled there two days and all together 180 bales, before I left. Our salesman Steve Silver had lined up a demonstration on monday morning, 9am, and at 8 am it started to rain. So we had no chance to run the demo but I showed the customers the baler, all the features and I explained them the features of the monitor.
Tuesday morning it was still so wet, that we were not able to bale, but wednesday we moved to another customer to show him our baler. When I opened the front cover above the flywheel to check the oil level at the compressor I had a nice surprise.

Two days no movement, and the baler became an RV for birds. There was still another bird's nest in the front of the tractor above the front hitch. I removed everything, and we moved the baler to our next customer. He still owned two BiG Pack 1290 XC, but he was also interested in the HDP baler. We had to bale wheat hay in his field. When I arrived at the field, his rake was in the field to flip over the windrows. Perhaps it is necessary that the material dries better in the windrow, but for baling it is not very good. The windrow has more material on one side now, and when you don't give care how you feed the baler you have more on one side. The result are bad bales bended to one side, and if you use cheap twine with less knotstrengh the twine will brake on the side with more density. And that's exactly what happend to the baler and the bales of our customer and it is also the reason why he is not so happy with the balers. Perhaps the not very well maintenance of our customer is another reason for his problems.

When we showed him the HDP baler, we didn't had any problems. The HDP baler did a better job under these bad conditions, and the bales looked nice and straight. Even our customer recognized that.


Perhaps a few words about maintenance at our balers - because a good maintained machine is the key to a good operation. Perhaps this at the beginning - The Krone baler is because of it's features like the knotter cleaning system and the central lubrication nearly maintenance free.

Here you can see a picture of our simple and secure knotter cleaning system. We use air pressure we generate with a small compressor at the front of the baler if we can't get it from the air-brake system of the tractor and we blow every time before the knotter works to the important areas of the knotter. So we make sure, that the dirt and dust is not at the moving parts, when we make a knot. This system works very well when you give some care of the compressor (checking oil and cleaning the air filter daily - takes perhaps 5 minutes) and if you don't bend the airlines away from the knotter. 
And  that is nearly the whole maintenance you have to do every day. Of course, you also have to check and refill the twineboxes, but you don't have to grease anything daily. The central lubrication greases all the moving parts like plungerrollers, VFS rollers and the knotters autimatically and constantly. You only have to make sure, that there is enough grease in the central lubrication. The few manual grase points at the axle and at the drivelines don't have to be greased daily.
So, to do the daily maintenance at the Krone baler is really not a big deal. Other brands needs much more maintenance work every day!

On thursday we went to another customer, who also owned two Krone balers, two HDP from 2007 and 2008. He is the complete opposite. He maintaines his balers every day before he starts baling, and his balers are in a really good shape. We went to his field, to show him our actual baler and the Harvest Tec moisture system. It was a really good field, because a lot of regrown material made some wet spots in the hay bales, and the Harvest Tec system found them all.

This is a picture of the monitor in manual mode. On the left you can see a graph, that showes you the last 90 seconds of measurement. Every bar is 3 seconds. On the right, where you can see LO% it showes you the actual moisture contend. (under 6% is too low for an accurate value - that's the reason why you see LO% on the picture). On the left side on the bottom you see the Average of the last bale. (here 7%)
In his field we had some bars with 24 - 32% in between. And when he checked the bales with his moisture tester, he could find this spots again with nearly the same moisture contend. So, the Harvest Tec system is very accurate.

Here you can see his two balers in operation - towed by two Case Puma 165 with 145 hp at the PTO.
The last two demonstrations were at two different dairys. Both times I baled Alfalfa hay. Bothe times we had nice heavy bales and we baled with speedes from 10-13 mph. Both customers were very happy with the performance of the baler. One ownes three self propelled Freeman small balers, and the other one has two Hesston 4910 4x4 ft big balers.
It was both times at nighttime, so it was dark outside and I don't have any pictures of it. 

So far for the moment!

Regards Niklas