I remember grandpa demoing a hesston back in the day and said the exact same thing that it was just too light, he didn't like it on our hills cus it drifted a little too much, he went with a 926 deere and thats what I still use today and man its heavy, still don't see much claas in my neck of the woods in southern ky but they seem to be great built machines as far as I can tell, good luck this season.
Claas builds good equipment... just great German engineering and top quality. We have a Ford 640 combine, which is a Claas "Senator" painted blue (Ford imported them from Germany in the early 70's through a loophole in the import laws-- so long as they didn't have an engine, they were considered "spare parts" and taxed at a much lower rate. Ford then installed either a 4 cylinder diesel or 300 c.i. Ford inline six cylinder industrial gasoline engine (basically the same as the 300 six in the Ford pickups but with sleeves in the block) and painted them Ford blue and sos ld them as Ford combines. Grandpa and Dad bought that combine back in '73 or '74 and did a lot of custom combining with it to pay for it as well as harvesting their own sorghum). Dad had bought an old worn out JI Case combine (a 660 IIRC) and fixed it up and did custom work with it a couple years and made some money, but the old combine had about had it. They decided to buy the big Ford (back then, it was one of the biggest combines in the US... It had an 18 foot platform header on it, which barely caught six 40 inch rows, but missed a few leaning heads on the milo, so they usually just took five 40 inch rows which had the ends of the head brushing the two outside rows. They had a deal with a big farmer that always hired his crops harvested back then, before air conditioned pressurized cabs, because he didn't like getting hot and dusty in 100 degree July Texas heat combining corn and sorghum. Anyway, not halfway through the first year, he got a better deal and screwed Dad and Grandpa over, and they had to figure out a way to make the payments quick... As it turned out, grain sorghum prices were soaring at the time and this big operator in the north end of the county rented a bunch of river bottom land and planted it all in grain sorghum. Problem was, it was a hot, wet June and the chemicals weren't very good to control weeds back then, and the morningglory vines came in like gangbusters. By mid-July when the crop was ready to harvest, the morningglories had sewn the field up like a mat. They climbed the stalks and ran up and down the rows, then spread their tendrils out and crossed the rows into a huge mat of green, sappy vines. The guy put the word out that he would pay top dollar to anybody who could actually harvest the grain, and they'd get as much work as they wanted. Dad and Grandpa drove the Ford/Claas over there the morning he staged a "combine face-off"... there were new Deeres there (4400 and 6600's), International 816-916's, a Gleaner or two, White, Oliver, all different kinds of combines... They started cutting and by lunch everybody else had quit and gone home... The combines of that era had nowhere near the horsepower of today and were built with lighter drives and less adjustment capability. The Gleaners had chain driven threshing cylinders with bolted-in concaves that took wrenches to adjust, and the Deeres of that era had a little crank wheel to adjust the concave clearance very slowly. Most others had wrench-adjusted concaves. Back then, NO combines had reversers on them like the modern ones have, and when they clogged up, it was an hour marathon of cutting, prying, pulling, sweating, and swearing in 100 degree heat to cut the vines and crap out of the cylinder and feederhouse and get it out of the combine. Dad had clogged up a couple times, but unlike the other US combines, the Claas had an advantage-- they extended the threshing cylinder shaft out the right side of the machine over the drive wheel, and on the end of it was a big round steel block about 6-8 inches in diameter, keyed to the shaft. It had four holes through it, so when the machine plugged up, all you had to do was shut it down, throw the thresher drive belt out of gear to disconnect the engine, leave the header drive belt lever engaged to turn the feederhouse and header, and then stick a long iron bar through the holes and turn the cylinder backwards, which basically reversed the combine by hand. In five or ten minutes, you'd turn the wad of vines all the way back down the feederhouse and back out under the header auger, then you just pulled it off the header onto the ground. Remove the bar and fire her up, let her clear, and go back to combining. The big iron reversing block also acted as a flywheel, to help the cylinder keep spinning through wads of crap hitting it, so it wasn't as likely to plug up. The Claas also used a much smaller diameter but wider 6 bar threshing cylinder that was about a foot or so wider than the Deere and other combines of the time, and the others tended to use a larger diameter 8 bar threshing cylinder that was narrower, concentrating the material into a thicker, narrower mat of material going through the thresher. The smaller diameter but wider Claas cylinder, by comparison, turned faster and was easier to turn (torque-wise) than the larger diameter Deere and other US combine cylinders, and therefore didn't lose as much momentum when slugs of vines hit the cylinder. Dad also found a trick that the Claas superior German engineering probably didn't intend but it worked great and made all the difference in harvesting the vine-infested milo-- to adjust the concave clearance, Claas put a lever under the seat by your leg. You could adjust the concave clearance on the go, unlike most other combines of that era, and do it quickly and easily. All you did was move the lever sideways to pull the pin out of the detent quadrant, then move the lever up to narrow the clearance, or down to widen the clearance. Dad found that if he watched the header carefully, when he saw a wad of vines get pulled into the feederhouse, or if he started to feel the vibration of a wad of vines hitting the cylinder that he didn't see, which was the signal of an impending plug-up, if he quickly reached down and shoved the concave lever all the way to the floor, the cylinder would just beat the wad on around through the concave and throw it on the straw walkers, and then he could close the concave back up with the lever to the proper notch, and continue combining... the wad of vines would ride down the straw walkers and out the back of the combine, without ever having to stop. The Deeres of the time had little crank handles to adjust the concave, and you had to turn and turn and turn to move it very slowly, so you couldn't do that on a Deere, and it would plug up and stall the machine. Everybody else's concaves were either bolted in or used bolt adjustments that had to be made when stationary, so you couldn't do it. That's why by noon everybody else quit. Dad made enough combining thousands of acres of grain sorghum that year for that guy that he paid for the combine in a single year... At one point he combined 8 railroad cars of grain per day. Nobody could believe it, that he could harvest that stuff... We still have the old Claas. Interestingly enough, it uses the exact same tires and rims as your Claas diskbine... We quit row cropping in '03, but I used it to combine grain sorghum that year, and it produced a cleaner, better threshed, less damaged sample than any other combine I saw... not as fast as the big modern machines, but it got the job done! Later! OL J R :)
Interesting I didn't know ford did that with there combines I know a lot of companies do stuff like that we had a deere tractor once that was just a yanmar painted green
Yep... Ford did a LOT of that... basically ALL their implements were manufactured by various short line companies (though Kelly and Dearborn were two of their favorites, particularly for tillage). One reason I've soured on New Holland was because they pretty much "froze out" all the old Ford implements for parts after the bad blood in the New Holland buyout of Ford Tractor Division in the 90's... And of course now that New Holland is basically owned by Fiat (Fix It Again Tomorrow) and now they've bought out Case IH to make Case/New Holland (CNH) I'm pretty fed up with them. We've got a Ford 552 round baler that is a repainted Gehl 1400 (IIRC the number) from the early 80's. This was basically before New Holland came out with their chain balers and all the rest, IIRC. The old Ford 14 foot model 247 tandem disk was, someone told me, built by Sunflower IIRC... Grandpa had an old Dearborn cotton stripper back in the 50's and 60's he stripped his cotton and did custom work with. It was made to strip one row of cotton and built to fit the Ford 8N tractors. The new Deere 3 point hitch disk mowers are just Kuhn mowers painted green-- they're exactly the same as the Kuhn GMD series 2 mowers... Later! OL J R :)
farmboy2218 cx95 should handle it without any problems that'd be like my 5400 their easy to pull as far as power but their heavy you won't be disappointed
Im just worried about it pushing the tractor around. our mccomick is a 2wd like yalls and very light, currently running a 408 New Holland, drawbar hookup so it doesn't swing, i dont wanna be spun around when i turn with a two point. if you get what im saying
Farmboy2218 as long as your not on steep mountain land it's fine with the McCormick an if you are you just have tobe careful an work your brakes when making sharp turns but on rolling land an flat land you won't have any issues
I remember grandpa demoing a hesston back in the day and said the exact same thing that it was just too light, he didn't like it on our hills cus it drifted a little too much, he went with a 926 deere and thats what I still use today and man its heavy, still don't see much claas in my neck of the woods in southern ky but they seem to be great built machines as far as I can tell, good luck this season.
Claas builds good equipment... just great German engineering and top quality. We have a Ford 640 combine, which is a Claas "Senator" painted blue (Ford imported them from Germany in the early 70's through a loophole in the import laws-- so long as they didn't have an engine, they were considered "spare parts" and taxed at a much lower rate. Ford then installed either a 4 cylinder diesel or 300 c.i. Ford inline six cylinder industrial gasoline engine (basically the same as the 300 six in the Ford pickups but with sleeves in the block) and painted them Ford blue and sos ld them as Ford combines. Grandpa and Dad bought that combine back in '73 or '74 and did a lot of custom combining with it to pay for it as well as harvesting their own sorghum).
Dad had bought an old worn out JI Case combine (a 660 IIRC) and fixed it up and did custom work with it a couple years and made some money, but the old combine had about had it. They decided to buy the big Ford (back then, it was one of the biggest combines in the US... It had an 18 foot platform header on it, which barely caught six 40 inch rows, but missed a few leaning heads on the milo, so they usually just took five 40 inch rows which had the ends of the head brushing the two outside rows. They had a deal with a big farmer that always hired his crops harvested back then, before air conditioned pressurized cabs, because he didn't like getting hot and dusty in 100 degree July Texas heat combining corn and sorghum. Anyway, not halfway through the first year, he got a better deal and screwed Dad and Grandpa over, and they had to figure out a way to make the payments quick...
As it turned out, grain sorghum prices were soaring at the time and this big operator in the north end of the county rented a bunch of river bottom land and planted it all in grain sorghum. Problem was, it was a hot, wet June and the chemicals weren't very good to control weeds back then, and the morningglory vines came in like gangbusters. By mid-July when the crop was ready to harvest, the morningglories had sewn the field up like a mat. They climbed the stalks and ran up and down the rows, then spread their tendrils out and crossed the rows into a huge mat of green, sappy vines. The guy put the word out that he would pay top dollar to anybody who could actually harvest the grain, and they'd get as much work as they wanted. Dad and Grandpa drove the Ford/Claas over there the morning he staged a "combine face-off"... there were new Deeres there (4400 and 6600's), International 816-916's, a Gleaner or two, White, Oliver, all different kinds of combines... They started cutting and by lunch everybody else had quit and gone home... The combines of that era had nowhere near the horsepower of today and were built with lighter drives and less adjustment capability. The Gleaners had chain driven threshing cylinders with bolted-in concaves that took wrenches to adjust, and the Deeres of that era had a little crank wheel to adjust the concave clearance very slowly. Most others had wrench-adjusted concaves. Back then, NO combines had reversers on them like the modern ones have, and when they clogged up, it was an hour marathon of cutting, prying, pulling, sweating, and swearing in 100 degree heat to cut the vines and crap out of the cylinder and feederhouse and get it out of the combine. Dad had clogged up a couple times, but unlike the other US combines, the Claas had an advantage-- they extended the threshing cylinder shaft out the right side of the machine over the drive wheel, and on the end of it was a big round steel block about 6-8 inches in diameter, keyed to the shaft. It had four holes through it, so when the machine plugged up, all you had to do was shut it down, throw the thresher drive belt out of gear to disconnect the engine, leave the header drive belt lever engaged to turn the feederhouse and header, and then stick a long iron bar through the holes and turn the cylinder backwards, which basically reversed the combine by hand. In five or ten minutes, you'd turn the wad of vines all the way back down the feederhouse and back out under the header auger, then you just pulled it off the header onto the ground. Remove the bar and fire her up, let her clear, and go back to combining. The big iron reversing block also acted as a flywheel, to help the cylinder keep spinning through wads of crap hitting it, so it wasn't as likely to plug up. The Claas also used a much smaller diameter but wider 6 bar threshing cylinder that was about a foot or so wider than the Deere and other combines of the time, and the others tended to use a larger diameter 8 bar threshing cylinder that was narrower, concentrating the material into a thicker, narrower mat of material going through the thresher. The smaller diameter but wider Claas cylinder, by comparison, turned faster and was easier to turn (torque-wise) than the larger diameter Deere and other US combine cylinders, and therefore didn't lose as much momentum when slugs of vines hit the cylinder. Dad also found a trick that the Claas superior German engineering probably didn't intend but it worked great and made all the difference in harvesting the vine-infested milo-- to adjust the concave clearance, Claas put a lever under the seat by your leg. You could adjust the concave clearance on the go, unlike most other combines of that era, and do it quickly and easily. All you did was move the lever sideways to pull the pin out of the detent quadrant, then move the lever up to narrow the clearance, or down to widen the clearance. Dad found that if he watched the header carefully, when he saw a wad of vines get pulled into the feederhouse, or if he started to feel the vibration of a wad of vines hitting the cylinder that he didn't see, which was the signal of an impending plug-up, if he quickly reached down and shoved the concave lever all the way to the floor, the cylinder would just beat the wad on around through the concave and throw it on the straw walkers, and then he could close the concave back up with the lever to the proper notch, and continue combining... the wad of vines would ride down the straw walkers and out the back of the combine, without ever having to stop. The Deeres of the time had little crank handles to adjust the concave, and you had to turn and turn and turn to move it very slowly, so you couldn't do that on a Deere, and it would plug up and stall the machine. Everybody else's concaves were either bolted in or used bolt adjustments that had to be made when stationary, so you couldn't do it. That's why by noon everybody else quit.
Dad made enough combining thousands of acres of grain sorghum that year for that guy that he paid for the combine in a single year... At one point he combined 8 railroad cars of grain per day. Nobody could believe it, that he could harvest that stuff...
We still have the old Claas. Interestingly enough, it uses the exact same tires and rims as your Claas diskbine... We quit row cropping in '03, but I used it to combine grain sorghum that year, and it produced a cleaner, better threshed, less damaged sample than any other combine I saw... not as fast as the big modern machines, but it got the job done!
Later! OL J R :)
Interesting I didn't know ford did that with there combines I know a lot of companies do stuff like that we had a deere tractor once that was just a yanmar painted green
Yep... Ford did a LOT of that... basically ALL their implements were manufactured by various short line companies (though Kelly and Dearborn were two of their favorites, particularly for tillage). One reason I've soured on New Holland was because they pretty much "froze out" all the old Ford implements for parts after the bad blood in the New Holland buyout of Ford Tractor Division in the 90's... And of course now that New Holland is basically owned by Fiat (Fix It Again Tomorrow) and now they've bought out Case IH to make Case/New Holland (CNH) I'm pretty fed up with them.
We've got a Ford 552 round baler that is a repainted Gehl 1400 (IIRC the number) from the early 80's. This was basically before New Holland came out with their chain balers and all the rest, IIRC. The old Ford 14 foot model 247 tandem disk was, someone told me, built by Sunflower IIRC... Grandpa had an old Dearborn cotton stripper back in the 50's and 60's he stripped his cotton and did custom work with. It was made to strip one row of cotton and built to fit the Ford 8N tractors.
The new Deere 3 point hitch disk mowers are just Kuhn mowers painted green-- they're exactly the same as the Kuhn GMD series 2 mowers...
Later! OL J R :)
We are looking at a claas 3150 like that one, we'd be running it with a cx95 McCormick. What's your opinion ?
farmboy2218 cx95 should handle it without any problems that'd be like my 5400 their easy to pull as far as power but their heavy you won't be disappointed
Im just worried about it pushing the tractor around. our mccomick is a 2wd like yalls and very light, currently running a 408 New Holland, drawbar hookup so it doesn't swing, i dont wanna be spun around when i turn with a two point. if you get what im saying
Farmboy2218 as long as your not on steep mountain land it's fine with the McCormick an if you are you just have tobe careful an work your brakes when making sharp turns but on rolling land an flat land you won't have any issues
Nice looking setup
Gem of a mower
We bougth one of those today😀😀😀
Hi.. Where? How much?
"Trøndelag Traktor" in Norway. It did cost around 200 000 norwegian Kroner
Interesting. Its 50percent more expensive in Greece.