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| Wow, what a difference rowed grass made versus the broadcast sod from the previous thread. http://u15205752.onlinehome-server.com/forums/thread-view.asp?tid=4... I took the machine to the field this moring and tryed it before the drill showed up. I figured I'd try it shallow and see what happened. It worked. It actually worked, and worked well. I was amazed, and very happy at that point. I took over 50 pictures but will try to narrow things down a bit. So here we go. See what you think.
First pass at random after entering the field. You can see the uncut crop on each side of the cut swathe. This is still at slow speed.
Drill showed up. We did a few dry runs to see what's what. We noticed something right off, which was following the vertical tool, the drill openers and the turbo blades ran very smoothe. They did not hop arouond much. In the uncut stuff, they would jump around a lot. Ok,....so.........
Initial settings. Turbos a bit deep.
Got the machine levelled out a bit. Shallow depth setting, same as when I entered the field. Maybe 3" or so average.
Oh, I forgot to mention, I got a raven cruizer a few days ago. I had'nt installed it in anything yet, so I figured I'd quick field tape it in the 4840 to se if I can figure out how it works. Pretty cool gadget really. As you can see, I was able to make it to a decent speed without beating the tractor too bad. I was supprised how well it rode, but then the ground is still wet so it will ride a bit smoother.
Temporary antenae loca...t.........ion, hey, get your mind outta da'gutter.;-))
This pic is a little close I see. It's supposed to show the planted on the right, and the unplanted, but cut stuff on the left. This is still just getting started this morning.
I went ahead and lowered the machine to about 5" deep or so on average. It worked even better, but did want to chunk a little more. I guess ya give some, and ya loose some. Here's a pic of a weak fescue crown that the wavys cut through.
Here's the small amount of chunking it did when set a little deeper. More than I wanted to see, but not enough to off set the benefit of going to that depth so I left it there. The drill then smoothed things out a bit more.
This is afternoon now and a little further into the field. A slight breeze was blowing at this time drying off the top. It worked very well for the drill to have a little dryer soil to cover with.
Following the drill. You can see the soil type line in the field real well right now. The green is somewhat ok loamy stuff, and the white, near dead looking stuff has a lot of white clay. We call it amity soil and unifarmor will know lots about that as he is near amity.
Drill working in a different area of the field.
This was good to see. My tractor pulling the coulters had virtually no slippage. I was hoping to see that as I really dont like to compact the soil surface when trying to plant.
Metarex slug food in the legume box. Hope it works. (fingers crossed)
Full of seed.
Looking down the seeded rows.
A closer shot of the seeded ground in an area to the outsides of the combine. This would be outside of the seperator discharge of the combine.
And finally, this would be in the seperator discharge area of the combine. You can see the "sprout" that makes for more of a problem closing the seed trench.
That's about all my fingers can take for now. I have a video camera, but I dont know how to hook it up to the puter and then I dont know if my dial up connection is good enough to upload on youtube or something. It would be cool to see video of this stuff working. We took turns driving the drill for a bit so we could both drive beside it in the pickup and watch it work. Works a lot different than not having the coulters cut the stuff ahead a ways.
Lot's of stuff I want to mention, but dont have the time or typing skills right now, so I hope you can follow the jibberish here. Though we are going to keep planting as things are, I feel there is still a lot of improvments to be made to further the ability plant into grass sod reliably and without limitations.
Thanks for looking.
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New update on coulter kits. In field. Lots of pictures.
