N IL | Last year there was a fair amount of people wondering what to do with the drive system on their 90 series airseeders so I thought I'd share what I did. I believe there was a couple guys who put Rawson drives on as well which would work just as good as this. Personally I opted for electric drive because I wanted to have a minimum of two drives the first year so I thought it would be a little bit simpler to set up. Two Rawson drives in my case would be overkill IMO. Thinking toward the future I also thought it would be easier to add more sections if I wanted. I do not think I'll get it done before we start planting cover crops but before next spring I plan to redo the metering system a little bit and add two additional sections. (I think 4 sections would be about the max for now without major modifications) The motors I opted to use are the 80 RPM version and have plenty of torque to turn the meters. I was originally going to go with the 120s for more torque but they were backordered so I just to these just to get it together. As it turned out I didn't need the bigger motors and ended up saving some money right off the bat. One thing I will note is you want to make sure your meter bearings are in good shape when you do this so the meters can turn as easy as possible. Mine were not and I ended up fighting it for longer than I should have. Since it was a last minute deal I ended up putting them in the lathe to clean them up but it will get new bearings next year. The drive hubs and sprockets are nothing special. The hubs just came from Farm & Fleet and I bored them out so I could mate them up to the sprocket. The sprocket itself is the same 22 tooth sprocket that drives the meter now. I started out driving it at a 1:1 ratio for simplicity but ended up around 1.57 or so because I thought I needed more torque to turn the meter which in reality led me back to my meter bearings. Once it worked we were planting so I left it. Before next spring it will be switched back to 1:1. For electronics I opted for the 20/20. I'm really not partial to any brand this was just a cheap way of getting a control system because of the special deal they were running. Graham makes cables to plug into anything so it doesn't matter what you use. Since I ordered mine for Precision Planting everything was pretty much plug and play. The tough part was finding the right drive settings to make everything happy. This took the better part of the day trying different values till it worked. If anyone wants these settings I would be happy to give them to you. It was also a little challenging finding my seeds per revolution but I managed to get close. The biggest problem I had was the 20/20 would always read low on population so I kept my Deere 350 in the cab to help set the population. It's my understanding now that there is either a setting I need to change in the 20/20 or I need different sensors. If there is any precision planting dealers reading this I'd really like some input on this. With that being said it was not that hard to set my population. I would watch the 350 and I might have had to set the row flow for example at 130,000 in order to plant 165,000 which was not a big deal. Cover crops will be interesting but that's what I have a scale for. So in conclusion I was very happy overall with how it worked out. My population stayed allot more consistent since I did not have the drive wheel bouncing over the stalks and throwing my rate off. We use implement steering and are always planting our soybeans between the old corn rows so the drive wheel was on the row 100% of the time. Also I went from having 8 chains, most of which you can't hardly get to, to only 2. I left the drive wheel on because I was sure how it was going to work but as soon as we were done I took it off and have no plans on putting it back on. Please feel free to ask any questions. I'm hoping to have all of this on our website as a reference to anyone who wants to look at it in the near future. Thanks
Matching up the hub to the sprocket, not much to see here....
Both drives before installation. The motor bracket can be clearly seen, it's nothing more than a piece of angle iron welded to the meter body...very simple.
Motor in place. In order to do 4 sections I'll just drive the meter from both sides.
The Graham relay box which mounts on the tractor, there is a larger one on the drill itself.
This is basically everything that was added for this project. I really have to give props to Graham for making their modules wireless, it really makes everything easy to install and reduces the amount of wires you have to run. The emergency shut off is just something Graham wants placed somewhere within the system. I didn't feel like running a wire all the way to the cab so I put it there.
This might seem like a random picture but it's one of the first ones I took when I finally got it working.
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