As an employee, Mike made the right call and did a damn good job. If it were me or Ward out there..................

 

I hear ya....At times it`s very tempting to not do the supposedly right thing!

 

I have taken on the challenge of making this thing work properly - we debugged it lots last year and it rolled the last 500 bales flawlessly. We will try a few more things and if it doesnt work, I have a hydraulics buddy who has an idea to take some electro - hydraulic stuff off and go with mechanical linkage control to some hydraulic controls. He thinks it can be made to look like it was a factory design because I dont want any 'modified looking' junk out here. The circuitry on this baler is problematic but otherwise its darn good. Most balers seem to give problems and are far more complex than ours

 

to quote samuel jackson, "sometimes doing the right thing means not doing the right thing..." anyone remember what movie thats from??

 

Cant say I do but is it the one where they rescue some ambassador and slaughter a crowd of terrorists that the government makes it look like hey were innocent victims?

 

nope... its S.W.A.T.

 

Well most of the parts were in for the baler on the previous breakdown but the ones that came today are wrong. I got the mechanic at the dealership to assemble the slip clutch and there are some holes in the pressure plates that dont line up. After the dealership did some digging with CaseIH they admitted to having a quality defect and the correct ones will be here tomorrow.

 

Thats along time to be waiting for parts.

 

Well CaseIH quality control said those parts should have been pulled off the shelf and restocked with the correctly built pieces. Imagine that!
We got it all together and its working well. The baler has a 'kicker' that moves the bale out of the way so the tailgate can close, otherwise, you must back up each bale so as you can restart in the swath next time around. The baler uses quite a rew magnetic switches that either power an indicator in the cab (bale full, twine tie arm position, etc) or power a relay when a function must be performed based on the signal. The circuit thats been historically problematic involves the switch thats activated when the tailgate is fully opened. It triggers a relay that puts power to a hydraulic soleniod. What happens - tailgate goes to the fully opened position then hydraulic flow is diverted to the cylinders on the kicker so it extends. It has given us problems in the past and the culprit appears to be the relay. Its a $30 part and 15 minutes or less to change so we will have a spare with us.
Baling is all done for now - we have 120 acres of green feed to cut later and will test it out when we go back to the neighbor's and repay the work exchange and run alongside the John Deere and see how they stack up.

 

It amazes me how advaced a baler is now a days. You should see the baler we use back in Nipawin, a 60's maybe 70s square baler haha.

I cant remember what kinda baler the guy that bales our land has but he has to stop each time a bale is ready to be kicked out.

Is that how yours works too Warren?

 

All round balers require stopping to tie the bale and sometimes its as long as to bale if the crop is heavy. We have an old square baler that we make some straw bales with each season.
Some of the new ones are much more complicated than ours and the features are all great (when they work) and whats worse is when those features prevent baling thus keeping you from 'making hay when the sun shines'!!

 

Cool, I didnt know they all had to stop. "back in the day" our round balers had to stop, but I was kinda thinking maybe they might have progressed by now.