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alebrenn

Posted 9/23/2012 12:34 (#2605180 - in reply to #2604347)
Subject: RE: Silage season is coming to an end....sniff, sniff (pics)

SW NE

I'll try to answer everyone's questions here:

The chassis were purchased from GEA Houle. Houle introduced the chassis this past winter so after looking at a few different companies that made chassis (DM and Jamesway) we went with the Houle. The front and rear axle steer and they have six wheel disc brakes with two calipers on each disc. In addition we installed the hydraulic braking kit on each of our tractors so that when the brake pedals are pushed the trailer brakes are activated too.
The boxes were fabricated by two local conservative Mennonite welding shops. The owners of both shops are brothers so each one built two boxes. We wanted to use dump trailer cylinders, knowing that they would have a long life but in doing this we knew we wouldn't be able to use the hydraulic oil from the tractor as the hoists required approximately 30 gallons. So, using some info. from fellow NAT'rs we used Prince PTO pumps with Muncie 50 gallon poly tanks mounted on the chassis. In addition we had an electric valve tied to a rocker switch in the cab. The driver placed the switch ( which was from the John Deere Gators that had a picture of a dump bed up and dump bed down on it and fit right in to an empty switch slot on the dash) in the up position and turned the PTO on to raise the back door and then it would raise the box. Once the box was up, they simply turned off the PTO and pressed the switch the other way to let the box down. We timed it and the box was unloaded and on its way back down in 45 seconds.

We pulled them in some hills, Garvo, but I'm sure what we call hills would be considered flat land to you. I would think in your hills, we would need MFWD tractors with duals up front or 4wd tractors. Currently we use two 8130's, an 8120 and and 8320, all with performance chips.

This year, we ran a Krone 1100, but finished up the season with our traded in Krone 800 V12....don't ask why! Haha

I will post some more pics of the chassis. Since many of you NAT'rs are very observant, you'll notice in the chassis pics that I post that the boxes had five sections and in the season pics they had four sections....the frames, which we had beefed up some more, weren't strong enough to handle the hinge point being that far back behind the axle so once they were completed and we tested them they had to go back to the welding shops and have the last section cut off and the hinge point placed right behind the rear axle. The length of box that we originally made would have worked better on a quad axle chassis. Kind of an expensive trial and error deal....

If you would like closer pics of the chassis I can take some in the next few days and post them. Just let me know.