Friday, October 10, 2014

The chopper

Gehl 1075 on right, grass and corn heads on truck.  
 Picked up the forage chopper; a gehl 1075 with a grass head and a two-row corn head.  The tractor I'll use to drive this chopper is a 125hp, and I'm hoping that it's powerful enough.  The previous owner was running it with a 150hp tractor.  Guess I'll see what sort of speed we can do.

Going over it with a grease gun to make sure that everything that should be greased is.  Checking chains and belts, making sure tires are full.  Takes a couple of hours to get everything all set and then I'll run it slow for a while to make sure that everything is spinning the way it should.  Got the tank of farm diesel full for refueling...  can't think of anything else that needs to be done before we start chopping.    

Rain forecast for saturday; partly sunny sunday and monday and then rain for the forseeable future.  looks like chopping will be on sunday; hope to get it all done by then.  Tires and tarp are all set, silage pit is repaired and scraped clean...

3 comments:

George said...

I assume you've gone over the knives and shear bar to make sure things are good and sharp, the shear bar isn't rounding off etc. The knives should self sharpen, so there's a grinding stone in there too, you'll have to check clearances etc.

How many knives are you running? IIRC there are sprockets you can set/swap out to change the length of cut too. Hopefully you got a manual :)

With the gehl it likes to be kept full to chop really well, variability in the field will most likely give you a longer chop sometimes, but I wouldn't worry about it too much.

Bruce King said...

We did go over the knives and did a test run of 50' to see how it chopped. Unfortunately the ears are too green -- they got juiced more than anything, so I'm going to wait at least a week before we chop the field, hoping that hte kernels get more starchy and will survive the chop better. Otherwise the juice from the kernels will run off and it'll be lost.

The size of the chop is good; it does a complete job on it. Really wanted to get the corn into the silage pit, but waiting is what is needed now. Patience.

George said...

Yea we're stuck in the corn limbo right now too... waiting for it to dry down and it has been raining off/on for days. Watching stalks go down in the rain/wind.. no fun.