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| I've always thought that it might not be too difficult to put a really wide cylinder, centered in the frame, ahead of the rotor inlet to do most of the threshing. Open concave under it with material flowing by gravity into distribution augers/accelerator rolls.
Then crop material off of that cylinder gets pulled into the transverse rotor in the center where it would be split, flowing outward both ways with discharges in both rear corners. With most threshing and a lot of separation happening at that cylinder, it would leave a LOT of capacity in the rotor to complete the process and wouldn't require widening the machine much, if at all?
A design like that would improve a few things over the current design:
Centered feederhouse
A much wider feederhouse, increasing capacity and/or allowing the slowing down of the feeder system to reduce wear.
Discharges at both corners of the machine, making more even spreading and maybe even giving a slight edge over the competition to being able to spread way out there with the wide headers we are seeing.
Natural Flow would be retained.
Threshing cylinder and rotor speeds could be set independently, allowing for flexibility in setting.
It would not require a complete, from the ground up, overhaul of the combine design, saving development cost.
But lets face it, unless something can be done at a rather low development cost to get the transverse into the higher classes and with room to go even higher into the future, AGCO isn't going to continue to develop two separate combine lines now the they have the Ideal that is already set down that path. I foresee a day where we might see the Gleaner badge on what is actually an Ideal. If that happens, I would hope they would at least try to incorporate some of the elements that make Gleaners what they are, like adding the accelerator rolls to the Ideal cleaning system somehow.
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Gleaner Combines
