Columbia Basin, Ephrata, WA | mennoboy - 8/30/2015 10:18
Straight combine headers were very rare so were limited to picking up swaths for the most part. Seeing the 2+2 with a 1482 with what looked to be a flex header is something I've never seen before.
That was a 17.5' rigid platform in the HCOP pictures. We had one that we ran on a 1682.
In the later mid 90's we got heavily into clover and grass seed. We had a 7720 combine, but needed a lot more capacity for the small seed crops, which are always swathed. A 1680 was still a relatively new combine at the time and priced accordingly. We bought the 1682 at a very significant discount to what a SP combine would cost. We hooked it up to a new JD 8400 and it worked great, left the 7720 in the dust for capacity and was nicer to operate from a nice new 8000 series cab. The 7720 was there to open headlands, so there was never a threat of running over crops with the tractor on the PT. The 1682 really worked great, and we added a 1482 and a new 8100 tractor in 1998 or 99.
After a few more years the seed business went bad for us and we stopped growing clover and grass. We sold the 1482, but kept the 1682 and got the rigid platform for it so that it could combine wheat alongside our recently traded for JD 9600. The 1682 got just as much wheat cut once the field was opened and had a nicer sample than the 9600.
We stopped custom combining wheat in 2005 and the 1682 was sold to a local farm to combine canola grown for seed, which again is always windrowed. They ran it with a newer 7000 series tractor with an IVT, which pretty much made the PT equally productive as the 1680's in the field with it.
Some days I think that if the IVT transmission had come out 20 years earlier, the PT combines may not have gone away. Realistically though, the movement away from windrowing crops and toward bigger headers is why there are only SP combines now.
Edited by Big Ben 8/30/2015 13:29
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Pull type combine ???
