12:04 AM
I'm burning a CD for one of the other guys on the crew. Nobody has gone to bed yet, but the night is young.
9:00 AM
Wake up call with Brent. The morning ritual is to eat a little something for breakfast, fill your water cooler with a big ice cube and some water, get dressed, and meet outside by the pickups.
12:10 PM
Started cutting wheat. We finished up about 6 acres on one field and moved 4 miles to the next one. Shawn asked me earlier if I wanted to run combine #5 since the plan was to take #4 north today. That plan later changed and it will now stay with us for today, but I ran #5 anyway. I would like to get some time behind a MacDon to see how well they perform.
11:30 PM
We finished up for the evening with a total of about 700 acres done today. Tyler brought back truck #4 to the trailers so it can go north tomorrow morning. Cash spent the day driving the MX270 with the grain cart. He said he drove it just under 100 miles today in the field chasing down combines and trucks. The other cart tractor probably put on just as many miles. The high temperature for the day was 111 degrees again, but this time with more humidity than last Saturday.
That MX270 looks awesome with the duals up front and triples on the back. After seeing it run though, the 54" wheels in the back don't make for a smooth ride. When driving at an angle to the rows, the spacing on the tires fall into the ruts and the cab shook viciously. It was hilarious to see how much the cab shook. The poor guy driving it though had a pretty rough time though. I think the right side console shook apart once, the rear window would shake the latch open, and the drawbar bolts actually shook loose one day. Fortunately they didn't fall out. I can't see how Case IH gets away with more HP in this tractor with the MX285. We had a hard time with the cooling system as it was. Of course a fully loaded grain cart being pulled across a field as fast as the tractor will possibly pull it tends to create a lot of heat. Not that the 9250 didn't have heat issues today, but it wasn't nearly as common.
As for running a MacDon, all I can say is wow! In the conditions we had today, I could get a cleaner cut with this 36' head than the 30' 1010 headers could. That meant that I could drive faster with the MacDon while taking in an additional 6' of crop. It did very well at bouncing over rocks and didn't cause any problems when the crop got tough at the end of the night. I think that a combine with an AFX rotor being more quite would get you in trouble since it would be more difficult to tell when the crop is getting tough. I'd have to try it side by side to be completely sure of this theory though.
| YouTube Video 36' MacDon, part 1 |
YouTube Video 36' MacDon, part 2 |