Snout Sickle Cuts Away Soybean Stems

Snout Sickle cuts away soybean stems COMBINES Accessories 12-3-7 A 1 ft. long vertical sickle, sticking through the right snout of his Gleaner combine's soybean head, lets LeRoy Bauer, Shakopee, Minn., cut away soy-bean stems that would otherwise "bunch up" on the snout. Bauer, who drills all his soybeans, says lodged plants often caused problems. "No matter which way the plants were leaning, they'd bunch up and eventually plug up the end of the sickle. Now, the plants go right on through. They didn't plug up once last fall." To build the knife, Bauer bolted 6 knives to a sickle removed from an old silage chopper, then bolted 6 guards to a 10 in. length of 1 1/2 x 1 1/2 in. angle iron. To make room for the sickle, Bauer cut a 1 x 6 in. slot in the snout. He also added a piece of tin, fitting it between the snout point and knife. The tin is shaped so beans slide smoothly into the knife. A hydraulic oil pump connected to the bean head's drive shaft delivers oil from an 8 gal. beer keg, clamped behind the bean head, to a nearby orbit motor. This motor drives a 4 ft. shaft running diagonally along the bean head. The shaft's lower end is connected to a pitman which drives the sickle up and down. "All of the combine's hydraulic valves were used up, and that's why we had to mount the oil pump on the drive shaft," says Bauer. "Anytime the drive shaft is running, the vertical knife is running. The knife runs fairly slow, less than 100 revolutions per minute, so it hardly wears at all." Bauer plants soybeans with a 13 ft. drill, leaving 1 skip row so that when he makes 1 round he has 2 tracks for his 26 ft. sprayer, used to apply postemergence herbicides. "I always begin combining by keeping the left edge of the bean head in the skip row, so the add-on sickle isn't needed for the left side of the bean head. After I go through the field once, I cut clockwise in small circles so that the left side of the bean head is always over beans that already have been harvested." Bauer figures he spent less than $100 for his invention. He already had the orbit motor, and he borrowed the 4 ft. drive shaft from an old silage chopper. His main cost was the oil pump. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, LeRoy Bauer, 1845 W. 130th St., Shakopee, Minn. 55379 (ph 612 496-1703).

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