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SW Minnesota | How wide do you want to stack bales on your trailer? A Farmhand or Hoelscher accumulator only builds a 2-bale long pack. This wastes space on an 8-foot wide trailer, unless you want to have someone on the trailer restacking bales. If you make 36" long bales, most people stack them putting 4 the long way and 1 across the end to fill up the entire width of the trailer.
So if you don't want an accumulator that drags the bales on the ground as it's building a pack, that leaves you 2 choices for an accumulator - Steffen and Kuhns. Both companies make a model that builds a 10-pack with 8 bales the long way and 2 bales the other way to make a tie row.
I don't have any experience with a Steffen system but from what I've read in the past, they make a good machine. The downside of this one is higher cost and it uses hydraulics to run it, which requires maintenance and adjustment to work smoothly.
Then there is the Kuhns system. I have one of these, along with their loader grapple. I absolutely recommend this system. Well-built and requires no electrical or hydraulic components. The loader grapple is also well-built. I have a Model 1036, which builds the 10-pack I described earlier. There is a video of this model in action on their website. I like this configuration as I can build a tied stack on the racks and trailers simply by picking up the pack from opposite sides for each layer on the rack. Essentially this makes a stack pretty much the same as one would build on the rack if you were stacking it by hand.
If you want to build packs with more or less bales than this, Kuhns makes many different models that build packs from 8 to 18 bales.
Edited by jd-tom 12/23/2014 10:41
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Bale Accumulator and grapple
