Big Grain Cart Loads Semi In Less Than Six Minutes

Big Grain Cart Loads Semi In Less Than Six Minutes WAGONS/TRAILERS Miscellaneous 26-6-11 With just the two of them to handle all of the harvest duties, Steven and Neil Soehren, Windom, Minnesota, figured a good-sized grain cart would give them some temporary storage capacity in the field. "One truck wasn't enough to keep ahead of the combine, but we couldn't justify two and the second driver that would go along with it," Steven says. "I figured if we had a big cart, it would speed up harvest without adding much in the way of cost." It took a little time and required that the brothers acquire some new skills, but they built the cart Steven envisioned in their farm shop. Their four-wheeled pull-type cart holds 1,100 bu. of grain and has a front-mounted, turret-style auger that can load a semi from either side of the cart in approximately six minutes. To build the cart, the Soehrens bought an above-ground fuel storage tank. "It was 11 ft. in diameter and 21 ft. long," says Neil. "We first cut the tank apart. It had 10-gauge steel on the bottom half and 12-gauge on top. We couldn't find anyone locally who would bend it for us, so we built our own break-press to form the pieces into the shapes we needed. Then we welded the pieces together to make the box." Their box measures 20 ft. long by 12 ft. wide and 14 1/2 ft. high. It slopes to the bottom center, where a drag auger pulls grain to the front. A series of four hydraulically controlled doors regulate the flow of grain into the 19-in. turret auger. The box mounts on a frame made of old bridge I-beams that measure 4 3/4 in. wide by 10 in. deep. The rear axle is the drive axle from a 750 Massey combine. The rear wheels and tires were salvaged from the same machine, but the tires had been designed for use on a Terragator. For the front axle, they went back to the junkyard and found an old IH heavy-duty truck front end. "The truck was rated at 18,000 lbs. I'd never seen anything with that size of spindles on it before," he says. On the front, it has wheels and tires from a Gleaner combine. "I bought them at an auction for $50. The Gleaner wheels fit the truck hubs with no adapter," Steven says. In sizing the frame, they set the rear axle 7 ft. from the back of the box, so it would carry 70 percent of the weight. "In order to keep some weight on the front axle, we set it back about 3 ft. from the front," Neil notes. That posed a bit of a problem for steering it with a tongue, though. After several attempts, though, the brothers designed a steering linkage that allows the tongue to pivot at the front of the box, with tie rods to the front wheels. "It actually steps down the action of the tongue, so it has to move quite a bit before the front wheels begin to turn," Neil says. "But it keeps the steering action from being jerky, which is something we needed to avoid in a wagon this big. It also makes it easier to back up than most four-wheel wagons." Augers and how to drive them posed another problem. They bought 4-ft. lengths of 18-in. auger flighting and built the auger for the grain cart themselves. "We had to have the tubes formed for us, but we put it all together in the shop," he says. On the front of the wagon, they mounted a gearbox they salvaged from a Bush Hog stalk chopper. "It's a big one," Neil says. "The tractor pto shaft goes into the center of the gearbox, and there are two shafts out the sides of it. We used sprockets and double 80 roller chain to make chain drives off of both sides of the gearbox to turn the augers." During the course of building the big cart, they found they needed to cut bearing races and resize shafts and sprockets to fit shafts. Rather than taking the parts to a local machine shop, they calculated the cost and figured they could justify buying a used industrial metal turning lathe. "It's not a fancy lathe, but it does what we needed it to do," Neil says. Since the augers are powered by the tractor pto, they need to leave a tractor with the wagon while it's in use in the field. They use a 4555 JD two-

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