Hagen Brothers farms,Goodrich ND | I farm in central ND and harvested spring wheat and flax with a Shelbourne Reynolds CX72 (cereal header ,7.2 meter or 24 ft). Have used the stripper since 98. The only repairs were to replace the stripper teeth and plates after seven harvests. About 1500 acres of wheat and flax per year. The stripper teeth / plates should have lasted longer, but I had never done a good job of leveling the header and adjusting the skid plates to keep the header at the optimum height. We got em in the rocks and dirt pretty often and really beat them up.
After replacing the stripper parts, I did a correct setup by the manual and see almost 0 wear or damage in two harvest seasons, they should last at least twice as long now. Last year we bought a second nearly identical 1480 IH combine that I ran with a JD 925 header with Crary air reel, so we were stripping and cutting in the same field. It made for some screwy looking fields with all the tall stripped and short cut straw, but gave me a golden opportunity to compare combine capacity with the two types of harvest systems, grain loss, volunteer grain / weed density in the fall and field dry down this wet spring. We have very good chaff / straw spreaders on both combines as everything is planted no till with JD 750 no till drills.
I ran the machine with the JD 925 head cutting grain while my brother used the stripper. First thing I noticed was that no matter how hard I pushed the combine, brother with the stripper was out harvesting me by a good 30% because he had almost no straw to grind with his combine. his chaff spreader had a good stream of material while the straw spreaders were doing almost nothing.
I did a seeds per SQFT check behind both combines many times and saw no more, usually less loss behind the stripper. This was verified by the amount of green in the field a month and a few rains after harvest.
Both stripper and cut stubbles caught snow to their full height last winter.
This spring, the stripper stubble dried as quick or quicker, than the cut stubble in spite of the increased snow catch in the stripper stubble, because their was no mat of cut straw to keep the ground shaded and wet.
We bought another Shelbourne stripper head this spring, so we will be running a pair of them this harvest.
The only con is that they are heavy and expensive new.
Edited by Jon Hagen 7/1/2009 22:48
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Shelbourne stripper head pros/cons
