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SW Sask | I don't know about the combines that my grandfather ran, but I can speak on behalf of dad...
Worst - 8650 White (pull type). Impossible to plug, but as dad used to say "I can set it to lose wheat on the sieves, over the walkers, or both. I just can't set it to save grain." He thought maybe the first one was a lemon, so he traded after only a year or two. But the second was the same.
Best - the replacement - 851 Massey (again, a pull type).
But I wonder how much the crops/conditions have to do with some of the ratings. We were farming all spring wheat, 30 bu/ac was a higher than average yield (1970s/1980s). Everything was swathed and harvested dry - no drying, no aeration bins.
In the rolling hills, there was a lot of variation between hilltops and low areas, both in grain and straw volume. Almost everybody I knew ran pull type combines, and most of those were pulled with tractors without any sort of a powershift. So the conventional combines (all brands) did better than the PT axial flows, as they didn't like the variability in material volume.
There weren't many Whites around. Masseys did a decent job, but they were famous for 'whitecaps' (small kernels saved, but not threshed from the hull). Conventional IHCs (914) were ok, but I seem to recall that they were a bit shorter on capacity, and had some reliability issues. Deere made solid machines, as always, but it was easy to get them to throw grain over. A neighbour in a hurry with a green combine made for some green stripes in the field the next spring!
I am always fascinated to think that the same basic machine can handle the hundreds-of-bushels-per-acre that you guys see in corn country, but can also handle small grains, and even tiny seeds like canola, and be fine-tuned to handle a 20 bu/ac (or lower) yield with negligible grain loss....
danr | |
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Best and worst Combine ever owned?
