This Fix Helps Bale Short, Light Crops

This Fix Helps Bale Short, Light Crops BALERS Balers 33-5-36 Tired of the frustration that short, light crops can cause when you're trying to bale them? Roger Gutschmidt came up with a simple solution that made feeding problems on his baler pick-up disappear. "I had trouble with my OMC roller baler on short or light hay and straw because it wouldn't feed in properly and always piled up on the pick-up until it plugged the baler," he says. Gutschmidt took a calculated gamble that the problem might be caused by rollers in his baler becoming somewhat slick from wear, and decided to coat them with something that would increase their ability to grab the plant material in the swath. "I painted 3 of the drums with æHerculiner,' which is a liner for coating the interior of truck boxes to protect them with a rubber coating that's kind of rough," he explains. "I brushed it on the rollers and the next morning it was hard as rock. The coating covers the cleats, too. It costs $25 per quart and I used about 1 quart per roller. I bought it at an automotive supply store." Gutschmidt says he sandblasted the rollers first to make them rough because he wanted the best adhesion possible, but he doesn't believe this step is essential. "Depending on your baler, the beauty of it is that you don't have to take anything apart. I just opened the back hatch and put the safety supports on and went to work painting on the Herculiner," he says. "I've already made 100 bales and it's not coming off one bit. Because it's got such good adhesion and it's grippy, the rollers grab the hay much better than they did before." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Gutschmidt Manufacturing LLC, Roger Gutschmidt, 6651 Hwy. 56, Gackle, N. Dak. 58442 (ph 701 698-2310; shopdoc@drtel.net).

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