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Rivers, MB | Overall, I was impressed. It was not a great test because most of the wheat I was doing was around 25-30bu/ac with some spots doing around 45. Its on some land that has gravel under the topsoil so the spring wheat just ran out of moisture. Was on a neighbors field and they needed a driver for an 1 hr.
We have a 9750STS w/ the 12.5L and a 9610 so this was big step up for me!
Impressions
Did not notice the heavy steering like some on NAT have noted.
Door PIP had not been done but didn't seem to loud in the cab and it seemed to seal well.
I liked being able to set all the machine functions from in the cab through the monitor.
Wish they had a counter on the screen that indicated how many bushels were in the hopper. %'s are fine but when the grain cart operator says he needs 100 bu to fill the truck, telling him you're 34% full doesn't tell him much.
640 draper (not the flex) is a very nice header.
Found the hydrostatic drive to be very sensitive. Moving the lever a little bit increased the speed alot.
It shifted really hard when accelerating and it changed gears itself. Is that normal?
Unload auger is big and unloads fast. Didn't like how wide the pattern of grain was out the end of the spout.
I plugged the tailings auger very easily in some greener wheat that had a tiny bit of kochia in it. the salesman said they're finding that the tailings auger will plug easily and they're thinking its because of the rethresher. Anyone else experience that?
Fuel consumption was about 24 ga/hr and i was doing about 23 ac/hr.
There's a whole lot of computers and sensors everywhere that may work great when they're new ( I actually got a few warnings of sensors not working while combining for an hr) but I wonder how it will be 10 years from now.
Autosteer works really nice but I have that in our current combines so not a big deal.
So.......
For $450-500 000 (including the header), how would I justify such a combine???
For $200 000, I could have 2 9600's or 9610's with 30' draper headers. My maintenance on those 2 combines would be less than $10-15000/yr and get the same or more done/day then the S690. I would have less depreciation/year and would save the interest on $300000 every year on the capital that I didn't have invested. Maybe things are different in corn and bean land but up here, I don't see how the cost justifies what I get. What am I missing??
I'm a young guy who's not scared of computers and new technology. But I'm wondering on how this would be good for my farm.
Any thoughts???
Edited by mennoboy 8/8/2012 23:18
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got to drive a S690 yesterday for an hour
