How To Set Deck Plates On Corn Head

We had some questions this year nearly combine settings to minimize grain loss. Here are a few good tips that Dave Wilson came beyond.

By: Dave Mowitz

Adjusting a combine is like balancing a tire. True, running a combine is far more than complicated than just adding a weight to ensure smooth tire rotation. Keeping a harvester at pinnacle chapters — and then it gleans all the grain from balance and produces a clean sample gratuitous of broken kernels — requires some fine tuning. Harvest speed must be in sync with the operation of the header or platform, threshing expanse, separator, and cleaning shoe.

Still, the tire illustration applies, considering adjusting a combine is a truthful balancing human activity. Making a change in one expanse of the combine operation can throw another area out of kilter.

For instance, a poorly set up caput tin can crusade an uneven menstruum of ingather into the cylinder or rotors. This, in turn, causes office of the crop to be underthreshed, resulting in cobs with kernels still fastened riding out over the separator into the cleaning shoe.

"If you see the cobs and kernels in the cleaning shoe or on the ground, y'all mistakenly increase threshing speed to remove those kernels," says combine expert Graeme Quick. "Instead of making the needed adjustment at the head, now you are overthreshing the entire crop. This results in broken cobs with kernels still attached as well as damaged grain coming off the chaffer sieve."

To make matters more complicated, combine adjustment is challenged by advances in crop breeding, which are turning those tried-and-true homespun adjustments that served you well in the past on their head.

Today's hybrids characteristic corn shanks that rarely drop ears in the field. Tenacious shanks can go far harder for a header's deck plates to strip ears from stalks, resulting in more butt shelling, for case. Light-green soybean syndrome delivers a mixture of both dry and green pods, which challenges threshing adjustments.

To guide you with the balancing act of combine performance, Successful Farming magazine'southward Combine Doctors, Earl Knuth of Barker Equipment (a John Deere dealership based in Indianola, Iowa) and Graeme Quick (a retired Iowa State University engineer and 1 of the leading authorities on combine performance in the world), present this curt course on key adjustments that volition proceed you speeding beyond fields this fall.

Finding the sweet spot

While at that place is no single path to discovering the operating sweet spot in a combine, there are some accented rules yous must follow to fine-tune a harvester for meridian performance, suggest Quick and Knuth. The first of these binding rules is to live with your operator'due south manual. "It should be worn from use," says Knuth. "The transmission reveals the crucial first baseline adjustments and gives a wide multifariousness of tips on fine-tuning settings."

Too employing the transmission, other primal commandments in Quick and Knuth'due south harvesting bible include:

• Brand simply ane adjustment at a time.
• Know why yous are making an adjustment before making it.
• Double-check the result of the last aligning before making another change.
• Operate the combine at its full capacity equally you suit speed and operation "to handle a full menses of ingather in guild to continue the harvester as full as possible," Quick explains. "The outcome volition be more grain-on-grain threshing, less grain damage, and higher field efficiency."
• Check functioning often and peculiarly whenever ingather conditions alter.
• Perform a impale-stop examination of your combine from time to time. This involves stalling the combine in operation while information technology is fully loaded. "This freezes the activeness to reveal what is actually happening in the concaves or cleaning shoe, for case," Quick explains. "Make doubly sure that a kill-stop is allowed in the operator's manual. Otherwise, you lot may harm the combine."

Post-obit are 7 key areas where you can brand adjustments to your combine.

1. The ingather

Beyond the obvious effects of weather, a key component in establishing a baseline to adjustments is to size up the ingather. This can only be washed by getting out of the cab and walking fields. "Break cobs in half and check their composition," says Knuth. "Cobs that have soft, white centers are going to be harder to thresh than those that are house and pink."

If the soybean ingather is delivering upwardly a high amount of green beans, your only option is to hold off on harvesting. Don't wait likewise long, though. Soybeans that reach 13% moisture content should be harvested as shortly as possible. Once more, the combine's operating manual will offering initial settings to accommodate particular crop atmospheric condition. Set according to that guide and adapt as needed.

For beans, check pod height off the basis to adjust platform meridian. For corn, look at stalk diameter since that can affect the deck plate setting.

2. The cut platform

Fine-tuning adjustments are crucial for the cut platform as they account for 80% of total harvest losses in soybeans. Soybeans tin can be a challenge to cut, due to green stems and low-hanging pods. To cut losses, Knuth gives these adjustment tips.

• Apply a reel speed 10% to 25% faster than basis speed (upwardly to 50% faster if ingather is lodged).
• Keep the reel beam 6 to 12 inches ahead of the cutter bar and as low as possible.
• Discover if the reel bars get out soybeans just equally they are cut. The reel depth should exist set low enough to control the beans.
• Check the motion of cutter bar, suspension springs, and support runners on cutting platforms.
• Drop the cutter bar as low equally possible if more pods are shut to the ground. The front drum of the feeder should be depression enough so the chain just clears the flooring of the feeder business firm. If plants are shorter, smaller clearances may exist needed betwixt the reel, cutter bar, auger, and the feed conveyor chain, to brand sure stalks are feeding through the platform.
• Set reel position and speed (if operating a draper header and these take grown in popularity on broad platforms) then the reel lightly flicks the crop onto the drapers without impeding crop flow beyond the header. This typically works out to a reel speed nearly 10% faster than ground speed. Also, draper speed (which is non dependent on ground speed) should be set to provide a consistent windrow formation entering the combine.
• Consummate the harvest equally quickly every bit possible after beans reach thirteen% moisture content.

3. The caput

Automatically adjusting deck plates have certainly simplified tweaking heads. Adjustable plates are decumbent to spacing problems, yet. "Over time, one or another of the plates across a caput can seize and become inoperable," Quick warns. "You lot won't realize this unless you get out and measure the spacing at each row."

Since deck plates detach ears from stalks, their openings should be narrow enough to keep ears from butt-shelling merely not be so wide that small-scale ears tin can fall through. As well-narrow plate spacings will result in excessive trash coming into the caput. Also, plate openings should be tapered from front to back. By and large, the bottom gap would be ready 1/8 inch wider than the top opening.

Other cardinal corn caput adjustments include:

• Check to see that the gap betwixt snapping rolls is the same every bit the deck plates.
• Lucifer snapping roll speed to the forward operating speed; this speed ought to snap ears off about one half to two thirds of the mode upward the deck plates.
• Set trash knives close to the rolls to forbid weeds and stalks from wrapping.
• Lucifer the gathering chains' motion to the forward speed of the combine. If chain speed is as well fast, stalks may exist pulled out of the ground and broken, which results in ear losses. If the combine is traveling too fast for the bondage, stalks volition be pushed forward, and ears will be stripped off and thrown to the basis.
• Set the flighting clearance on the caput's auger from the stripper bar so that crop or stringy material is not carried over and around the auger. For heavy crop-residue weather, clearance tin can be brought upwardly and forrad for greater capacity and less carryover by the auger. Typical cross auger-to-pan clearance for corn should be one inch.
• Inspect the entire header acme control arrangement (if your head is so equipped) for sluggish and inconsistent meridian-control reaction, considering that'due south what will issue if this system is incorrectly adjusted.

4. The feeder house

Often overlooked, the feeder business firm serves a crucial role in presenting the crop to the threshing cylinder rotor. "Whatsoever comes in and the mode that information technology comes in is also the way that information technology will go through the entire machine," Knuth notes. "In other words, if the crop comes in bunches as a effect of a faulty feeder business firm adjustment, then it is going to be threshed in bunches, and it's going to get out the back of the machine in bunches, resulting in losses."

Bank check to meet that the feeder house runs smoothly by setting its slats 1 inch higher up the floor in forepart of the feeder house.

5. The threshing and separation units

Like an 800-pound gorilla walking a tightrope, the threshing mechanism works best when the cylinder or rotor(s) speeds are balanced with concave clearance. "The relationship of speed and clearance is key not but to threshing only also to doing a good chore in properly loading the cleaning shoe," says Knuth.

Begin the process with those settings listed in the operator's manual, he recommends. After that, adjust to fit field atmospheric condition. For example, concave clearance should be changed in steps. Beginning with the widest setting and narrow the spacing until it is close enough to just thresh out the grain without causing seed damage.

Think that the primary duty of concave clearance is to regulate the amount of material that flows through the threshing unit. Running a concave too wide volition consequence in grain non being removed from cobs or pods. Running the clearance too tight, however, tin crack seeds and break upwards cobs.

Regarding cobs, a general rule to their condition is if the cobs are divide lengthwise, the clearance is as well tight. Cobs that are snapped in half mean the clearance is besides loose. After clearance is set, the most frequent aligning needed for the rest of the season will be cylinder or rotor(due south) speed. This happens to exist the almost misadjusted setting on combines, Quick says.

A too-fast speed amercement grain, breaks cobs, and results in excessive tailings, he explains. A too-wearisome speed results in grain non separating from cobs or pods, which, in turn, causes ingather to build upwardly in the concave. Likewise, a too-slow threshing speed tin overload the separator and cleaning shoe.

The place to start setting speed is at the height of the rpm recommended in the operating transmission, Knuth notes. Next, take a run across the field and check for grain damage. If some exists, dorsum down the speed until damage disappears.

The only exception to this rule is when harvesting difficult-to-thresh corn like high-moisture or frost-damaged crops. In this example, Quick recommends trying to reduce the clearance slightly to see if that improves threshing. If that doesn't do the trick, then you will accept no other option just to turn upwards speed to get the grain off the crop, fifty-fifty if information technology damages some kernels in the process.

6. The cleaning shoe

As long as grain isn't bravado out the dorsum of your combine and tank samples are make clean, unremarkably yous don't mess with cleaning shoe adjustments. However, Quick warns that only adjusting cleaning shoes once a flavor per ingather tin have a huge touch on on combine capacity.

A combine set to permit complimentary as well as unthreshed grain to return to the threshing mechanism loads the cylinder or rotor with additional material and impedes efficiency. "Threshing grain more than once is never a good idea, every bit this increases both breakage and stress cracks in corn," Quick says.

How do you plant a cleaning shoe's sweet spot? "At that place is no platonic setting that works the entire flavor, then go on on double-checking adjustments past chaffer and sieve openings and fan speed as often as crop conditions (multifariousness, grain moisture, etc.) change," he adds.

With the owner's manual in hand, make initial cleaning shoe adjustments later threshing and separation settings have been established.

With the chaffer and sieve openings at their maximum recommended openings, begin to fine-tune adjustments by setting fan speed to its lowest recommended level. Gradually increase fan blast until kernels brainstorm to exist diddled out of the combine or into the tailings return. Then reduce fan speed a small amount, Knuth says. This process establishes the maximum acceptable fan speed.

Side by side, close the chaffer and sieve openings slightly until merely a small amount of foreign material is existence carried back to the tank. "As a dominion, grain should autumn through the get-go two thirds of the chaffer," Knuth notes. "If at that place is a mat of material on the shoe, grain cannot fall through, and information technology'southward decumbent to be carried over the ear of the combine."

Knuth warns that chaffer and sieve opening affect air velocity and direction. They should be adjusted together, he says, adding that "one time initial settings are fabricated, information technology'south a fine-tuning balancing human activity for the residual of the season."

7. Chopper settings

The residue management system, or the chopper, was one time an afterthought. In this era of super-wide heads and platforms and loftier yields producing greater amounts of material other than grain, that has changed. Now, the chopper's operation is key in determining how residue will impact next year's crop. "That chopper consumes a lot of horsepower," says Knuth. "If it is improperly set up, you'll definitely experience a power drain on the residual of the combine."

Here are three central tips to chopper aligning.

• Brand sure chopper and chaff spreader speed is gear up to the crop equally recommended by the manufacturer. Making sure that the chopper is operating at the necessary velocity to recoup for rest volume and density not only improves distribution but also minimizes components' clothing and tear.
• Stationary knives should be positioned into the cut for soybeans and out of the cut for corn. Stationary knives influence how well balance is cutting, particularly in crops with high volumes of material other than crop. The meliorate the cut, the more than efficient tailboard vanes are at distributing balance across the back of the combine.
• Tailboard vanes' settings (when adjustable) should be dialed in co-ordinate to residue book and the velocity needed to inject it uniformly

Speak to an proficient at King's AgriSeeds now at 1-717-687-6224 or electronic mail us at info@kingsagriseeds.com.

How To Set Deck Plates On Corn Head,

Source: https://kingsagriseeds.com/7-combine-tweaks-to-boost-speed/

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