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North East Kansas | Hi, we currently own a drago series 2, and we need to do something for next year. The drago has done a decent job for us, but can be frustrating at times. I had some questions, especially for people that have run a GT compared to the series 1 or 2. The first thing is that our deck plates don't do at all what they are supposed to do. If you are harvesting at 5 mph in 200 bushel corn, the deck plates have so many stocks coming in that they absolutely just end up all the way open when harvesting so the only way to eliminate horrible loss is to set the cams so they can only open to a maximum of 1-1/8 inches. Basically we end up just setting it like the old style non adjustable heads. As the linkage wears, you need to sometimes make custom cams to keep the deck plates at this setting or eventually you end up with a 2" gap again. Even when blowing the drago out, we still end up with a couple rows that are always just stuck open on the deck plates. We had some bad loss this year because the linkage wore more than we were expecting, and we ended up with big gaps again. We also wish the deck plates would wear a little longer, but at least they are easy enough to replace. The only real annoyance is having to replace the auger drive chains, and horrible tensioner sprocket outer shell every year, but that's not the worst thing in the world since the head has been reliable. Back to the deck plates I remember the factory settings would always end up wide open also in drouthy corn since a small ear would get stick between the plates and hold them wide open. Again, adjusting the maximum on the cams was the only way to resolve this.
Do the deck plates on the GT pretty much just hold wide open when running a lot of stalks in just like the older series? We don't want to have to drive slow when our combine is capable of 4000 bushels per hour. Are there any other major advantages to the GT series? We have had some fluff issues here and there with our older series, but its mostly variety specific and it hasn't ever been a major problem.
We basically have a few options. We can upgrade to a new Drago GT which I am told there are none in stock in North America. We can just rebuild our head entirely and run it another 10 years. I am told it will cost about 15 to 20 grand to rebuild our series 2. We can buy a 4412 Case Ih head, or we can buy a Deere corn head, and adapt it to our Case IH combine. We currently run a 7150 Case IH combine. Also, we inquired about trading up to a GT last year, and our local Drago dealer said our series 2, 12 row head was worth like 15-20k. It seems crazy that a head that is so good becomes completely worthless after a few years. | |
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drago series 2 vs drago GT
