Swather "Expert" Builds Big Cutting Tables

Swather "Expert" Builds Big Cutting Tables SWATHERS Swathers 24-5-37 When crops are light, you can find yourself doing a lot of running across fields with the combine to pick up just a little grain. Grain producers who swath their crops can throw a couple of swaths together, but even then, there still may not be enough material to properly load the combine. Merle Blair, Youngstown, Alberta, says that over the years, his father, Cecil, tried several different methods to solve that problem. "As long as I can remember, Dad has been looking for ways to modify machinery to make it more efficient or use less manpower to operate ," he notes. Decades ago Blair combined three self-propelled 30-ft. swathers into one 90-ft. unit that required three operators to work together. In 1980, he made a 52-ft. swather table that mounted on a single power unit. Then, in the late 1980's, the Blairs built an 80-ft. swather that mounted on front of a Massey 760 combine with the feederhouse removed. It worked great but in the early 1980's, they switched to direct-cutting and the swather became obsolete. That's when Blair got the idea of using the swather components to make a big cutting table to mount on his big Ford bi-directional tractor. He cut the header apart to make a center discharge 38-ft. cutting table, with a 3-pt. hitch so it could be pushed in front of the tractor. "We used the original knife drive for the left side of this unit and a æwobble box' from a Deere cutter for the right side," he says. "We were able to incorporate the tractor's hydraulics into this one, and we're using a hydraulic motor instead of V-belts to run the canvasses." The 3-pt. provides the push, as well as lifting the entire unit up for transport. He wanted to be able to change the angle of the header without lifting the machine off the ground. "We mounted a beam under the tractor, parallel to the swather, to give us a push point, so we could raise the table with hydraulic cylinders," he says. Blair says that once you've figured out how to modify the swather heads, along with their mechanical drives, you can make one about any width you want. "They all have used the same design, with different methods of mounting them on the different power units," says Blair. Contact: Farm Show Followup, Merle Blair, Box 56, Youngstown, Alberta, Canada T0J 3P0 (ph 403 779-2142).

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