Pulley Change Lets Him Roll Up Short Straw

Pulley Change Lets Him Roll Up Short Straw CROPS Straw 27-3-35 Baling short small grain straw has been a problem for Edward Storch, Mannville, Alberta, especially the last couple of years when his crops have been stunted by drought. "We bale straw with a Case IH 8460 big round baler. When the windrows are light and the straw is short, the belts throw the straw back out again and you can't get a bale started," he says. Storch solved the problem by slowing down the belt speed in relationship to the speed of the baler pickup. He says making the change wasn't a huge problem. "I bolted on pulleys of a different size to the drive pulleys that run the belts," he says. He says the hardest part was determining the size of pulleys he needed in order to slow down the baler belts, while maintaining the proper pickup speed by using a lower pto speed. Changing the drive belt from one set of pulleys to another takes less than a minute, since the baler has a belt tightener pulley on a spring that can be released with a wrench or even your foot. "I was able to bale barley straw that was only 5 or 6 in. long after I made the change," he says. "I'd never been able to do that before." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Edward Storch, R.R.4, Mannville, Alberta, Canada T0B 2W0 (ph 780 763-2214; email: storchkn@telusplanet.net).

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