Mini Header Harvesters

Press, Volume CIX, Issue 31908, 8 February 1969, Page 8

Mini Header Harvesters

Two new small-plot harvesters, now being used by the cereal section of the Crop Research Division of the Department of Scientific and Industrial Research, have eliminated the tedious w’ork of cutting trial plots with sickles, tying the sheaves, sorting sheaves, carrying the sheaves to the barn, hanging them from wire supports and later taking them to the mill and threshing them.

“I have visited several research stations in Australia recently,” Mr L. G. Copp, the senior cereal breeder at the Crop Research Division at Lincoln, said this week, “and have seen the equipment used over there for harvesting small plot trials. I felt that rather than copy their machines we should design a harvester more able to cope with our much higher yields.”

There wei-e certain definite requirements for the harvester to make it suitable for his section’s work. It had to cut and thresh a large nutnber of three-row plots 16 feet long. It had to be cleaned

easily after each plot. The time taken for the harvesting of each plot and cleaning down the machine should not exceed two minutes so that the largest trials could be handled in one day. The header also had to be easily adjustable so it could be used with the different straw lengths of oats, wheat and barley. It had to be attached to an existing tractor so that the header could be detached and the tractor used for other purposes after the harvest. This had been a tall order to set before the engineer but Mr Jack Bowman, who constructed the machines, was able to fill all the requirements. One machine was made for the 1968 harvest and had been extensively modified and another similar machine had been built. Tractors fitted with an extra gearbox to reduce the ground speed were used to carry the headers. Air compressors driven from the power take-off provided compressed air for cleaning down the machines between plots. Each header had its own motor, independent from the tractor, so that the speed of the drum was constant. The headers were mounted on fixed frames attached to the tractors and winches were provided to ease the tension bn the supporting bolts while they were removed and replaced during the raising or lowering of the headers. This operation was necessary only when

changing to crops of different straw lengths, as from wheat to barley. It took from three to five minutes to alter the height of the header. An adjustable rubber draper, between the knife and the drum, allowed for differences in plant height of plots within each crop. One of the headers was made for the sub-station of the Crop Research Division at Palmerston North, but it had been used for a trial period at Lincoln. “The two machines have been used very successfully this season,” says Mr Copp. “We have harvested 64 plots with the two machines in one hour and as we become more experienced we will probably do much better. “The grain sample obtained is as clean as that from the stationary mill, the harvesting is much easier and requires less labour.” Mr Copp believes that the harvester could have a potential export value to overseas research stations. Since the publication of an article about it in “Span," a journal of the Shell Company, letters have been received about the machine from the Sudan, Switzerland, the United States, Australia and Canada.

In the accompanying photograph the harvester is seen in the field with an assistant in the process of cleaning down the machine with compressed air between plots. The photograph was taken by Mr J. Somers Cocks, of the D.S.I.R.