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SW Iowa | Have a 920 JD platform that Dad put a HCC orbit reel kit on in 2013. Cuts about 250-300A per year. It has steel lower tracks, but plastic uppers.
When it works, it works nice, but it seems like it has always had some trouble (off and on) throwing rollers out of the track and bending crank arms. I am fairly certain 90%+ of my combine-related downtime in the past three years during soybean harvest has been screwing around with the orbit reel mechanism. We mostly grow 15" soybeans, and it also likes to catch bean plants between the track and the poly and bunch up, which has also caused some frustration.
Somehow, today it bent a crank arm to a full 90 degrees (outward), tweaked a couple others, screwed up a half dozen tines (since the whole thing uses the two tines on the end of each pipe to try to keep the roller in the correct orientation) and though I'm not sure what was cause and what was effect, I now have a crack in the rear outer plastic track. The other plastic tracks are also getting more and more chewed up. We got everything bent back, tines replaced, and reinforced the track with a curved strip of ~1/16 steel bolted through the track (outside of where the rollers run). It made it about 1 acre before the first bat flipped backwards. Ran with tines on one bat pointed upward for the rest of that load, then swapped reel tines to fix it, and probably 500' into the next pass it wedged a different roller and stopped the reel. Bent everything back, and shortly thereafter another bat flipped. Finished the field with 5 bats working properly. When I parked the combine and was looking at the part number stickers on the plastic track, I noticed it cracked the steel reinforcement (where it was notched around the track bolt). This was all in the course of about 15 acres of total harvest.
No matter what I've tried, it seems the rollers pull on the inside rear track coming around the back, and then push on the outer track at the top where the tines "flip" to having the roller lead. These plastic tracks appear to me to be some sort of nylon... is it possible they've expanded/contracted over the course of 7 years so they're no longer the shape they're supposed to be?
Current kits appear to have metal track all the way around... has anyone switched plastic track to steel? Was it a magic 100% cure? Or just cause more damage when rollers go off the track?
It looks like 2 inner + 2 outer plastic tracks are +/- $300 plus shipping
2 inner + 2 outer metal tracks +/- $600 plus shipping
Putting the original brackets back on would be free, other than spending probably half a day screwing around changing everything.
I'm currently pretty tempted to take option 3. Anyone had similar experiences that can offer advice? | |
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HCC Orbit Reel - Steel vs Plastic Track - Throwing rollers / bending crank arms
