Rebuilt Bagger Handles Haylage Fast

Rebuilt Bagger Handles Haylage Fast HAY & FORAGE HARVESTING Forage Handling 28-1-40 Back in 1988 when silage baggers were still a relatively new technology, Kent Durfee, Almo, Idaho, literally looked everywhere for a used one. When a dealer found one of the original Eberhardt Silopresse baggers available in Nebraska, he hopped in the truck and went to get it. When he got it home, he was disappointed to find out it wouldn't handle haylage. "That's what I bought it for," he says. "The cables that came with it weren't long enough to fill even a 150-ft. silage bag, and they had to be rewound manually. We wanted to put as much silage in a bag as possible, so that was a disappointment, too." Instead of putting the old bagger up for sale, Durfee decided he could make it do what he wanted with a little work. That work stretched out over more than a couple of years, but he ended up with a bagger he still uses to stuff haylage into bags up to 200 ft. long, unloading a truck in about 10 minutes. "The major modification was replacing the original oscillating table with a hopper that has a large auger in the bottom," he says. The bin is designed so the auger sits in front of the packer shaft. Durfee's silage trucks dump onto a conveyor belt that feeds haylage into the bin. The auger spreads the haylage evenly across the packer shaft, which assures that the packer fingers fill the back more uniformly and quickly. "I had trouble with the original gear box and chain drive assembly, so I replaced the gear box with a truck axle. I modified the packer shaft so it has a sprocket on each end. That way, the axle drives the packer shaft from both ends," he says. "I had to turn the truck axle over to get the correct rotation direction. It was a 2-speed axle, and I left the selector on the axle, so it could be run at two speeds. So far, I've only used the highest speed, though." To fill longer bags, he replaced the original cable spools with new ones he made in his shop to hold 200 ft. of cable without overlapping. He added a hydraulic motor to rewind the cable. Finally, he didn't like the "really small wheels" on the original Silopresse. "They were perhaps 10 in. in diameter. I replaced them with full-sized implement wheels, so now the machine can be run on the road," he says. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Kent Durfee, Box 175, Almo, Idaho 83312 (ph 208 824-5536; email: durffam@atcnet.net).

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