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SW Sask | In SW Sask, we always ran PT combines. All hard red spring wheat and durum, all swathed. I don't remember how old I was when I first saw a bin with aeration or a grain dryer....
Anyway: grandpa ran CCIL (Coop Implements, made in Winnipeg) 960s. Dad used to joke that he knew three Coop dealers in any direction, because the chance of any one dealer having the parts you need was pretty slim... (of course, that was before online parts catalogs and cell phones...)
The next step up was an MF 8650. In fact, dad wasn't happy with the first one, so he tried a second. He said it was incredible at eating crop - he said that he was never able to find anything that would plug it. He also said it was easy to set - you could throw grain over the sieves, the straw walkers, or both... (his point being that you couldn't set it to save grain :-)
At that time, late 1970s, early 1980s, everything here was cropped 50/50 rotation with tillage summerfallow, and 25 bu/ac was an average crop. So throwing 1 bu/ac over was a big deal.
When that beloved (not) machine went down the road, a Massey 851 replaced it. That wound up being the last combine we had, and it ran for many, many years with very little trouble, and doing a fine job!
Neighbours ran 914 IHCs (an ok machine, a few character flaws, but no worse than anything else), JD 7721 (often referred to as part of the 'long green line', in reference to the volunteer grain in swaths the year after a harvest.....but I'd argue that was more about operator than machine). And there were a few 1482s around. In those days, few people had a primary tractor with PTO and powershift, so the rotaries got a bad reputation early on, as they were less forgiving of inconsistent feeding. We have plenty of rolling hills, and the volume of crop through the combine can change a lot between the low spots and the hill tops. The walker machines seemed to work more consistently in those conditions - the rotaries tended to throw over some grain if overloaded or underloaded, so that was a gear-grinding exercise to be shifting all the time....
danr | |
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Pull Type Combines
