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| My father had a 13 tower cabled water drive from '70-77' and in its last years I do remember going out with him carrying a few tools as he would work on it. It had corn shields on the tower that always had to be unbolted to gain access to the cycle valve. That was usually the problem that would cause a shutdown. It had a swinging arm with a coil spring that would create a detent action that would either open or close the water valve that caused the cylinder to reciprocate. As the cylinder would rise, it would eventually shift the swinging arm over center slamming a poppet on a seat closing the water supply and connecting the cylinder to a vent that would allow the cylinder to retract and trip the water valve back to open for another cycle. It had a large spring for cylinder retraction that would fatigue and break or get weak and the cylinder would not retract. In regard to the under truss machines, they seem to have appeared in our area around '72 and by 75' were no longer being installed as their early electric version with durst gearboxes had appeared. In theory they should have been a big improvement with more crop clearance, a flexible joint and the cycle valve was relocated high up along the mainline pipe to keep it out of the crop that occasionally would cause the valve to jam. It also had a separate smaller water cylinder that was pressurized at all times to provide the return force to replace the troublesome coil spring. However I was told that due to quality problems of the water components and poor assembly by setup crews, these machines were actually somewhat less reliable than the older cabled machines. Also buyers thought with the under truss design and tower flex joints that they could put them on more rolling ground and the inherent nature of the drive system to roll ahead caused a lot of problems. The HiGromatic water drives were made from the early 60's to the early 80's as a Butler built product. The early ones were cabled towered machines and the later were 'warren truss' under truss designs that were at first chain drive and later used a grove 5:1 center drives and durst final drives and used a large spinner with four arms. Actually pretty reliable and would not roll ahead like the valley design. The early versions had a smaller high speed spinner that worked well but was high upkeep. A very interesting era compared to today. | |
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Old Valley center pivot pic
