Home Built 3 Pt Hay Wrap

Home built 3 pt hay wrap HAY & FORAGE HARVESTING Bale Handling (5) 13-5-7 "I've wrapped 18 bales in 42 minutes using my home-built hay wrap," says Russell Brierly, Osceola, Iowa, who built his own spin-on 3-pt. round bale wrap-ping machine from scratch, using an orbit motor and a differential housing from a junked Massey 70 combine: Brierly got the idea while watching a demonstration of a commercial bale wrap machine that cost several thousand dollars. "I built my bale wrap machine, complete with orbit motor, for only $475, and I can operate it entirely by myself. I simply spear the bale, raise it and start wrapping. I use a shutoff valve to operate the orbit motor. It only takes about 20 seconds to wrap a bale." Brierly's first step was to remove the differential housing from the combine along with an attached 10-in. dia. steel hub. Brierly cut off the combine's drive shaft, leaving a short stub on the differential housing. He connected the orbit motor to the short stub. The 3-pt. and the drive-shaft side of the differential attach to a 2-ft. square framework made from 4-in. sq. steel tubing. The other end of the differential housing attaches to a 24-in. dia. circle made from 5/8-in. sheet metal. He welded the 24-in. dia. circle to a triangle-shaped frame made from 3-in. square steel. Then he welded a 5 1/2-ft. long prong to each corner on the triangle. "The differential housing turns the triangle-shaped frame as a unit, just like it turned the hub on the combine wheel," says Brierly. "I can control the bale's rotational speed by using either the tractor throttle or a hydraulic control valve I took off a grinder-mixer. " Brierly welded a 5-ft. cutterbar to the unit to cut off the plastic. A 10-in. wide "brake" bar runs the full length of the plastic and rubs on it to pull it tight. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Russell Brierly, Osceola, Iowa 50213 (ph 515 342-2709).

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