JD216 flex head working in short beans

Tomorrow i am starting to harvest real short beans that just accumulate on the cutter bar and platform on my 216 flex head. Short beans dont want to flow steady, but tend to collect then get fed in big bunches which makes the combine grone.Problem is the steel fingers on my reel can not be safely adjusted to sweep the crop into the auger because they can hit the knives, what are other growers doin in small beans?Im thinking of removing the steel fingers and using the reel more like a bat reel to keep the crop flowing

I've seen some guys attach pieces of belting to the bats, longer than the teeth, which help sweep in the beans but don't get cut on the knife. They sure can be a frustrating crop to harvest when short. Ben

Run the header as low as you can. IF the ground is dry you can increase the down pressure the skid plates have on them and not push too much stuff in front of the header. SO if you have Dial-a-matic run in the lowest setting. IF yours is an older toggle control header adjust the control rod to run as low as you can.


Also there is an attachment called a rock guard. It basically is a flat piece of metal that you bolt across the header behind the sickle. It stops rocks from feeding up the flex plates. What it also does is makes short crops flip over it. Then the butts are high enough away from the sickle for the reel tines to feed them in.

I have made a similar thing out of smaller round plastic conduit. Usually 3/4 or 1 inch diameter pipe. Take the one hole loop type conduit hangers. Lay your pipe across the header behind the sickle. Then put the conduit hangers under the sickle guard bolts facing towards the back. They will hold the Plastic pipe and still allow the sickle to flex. Put a clamp about very foot or so.

Also forget taking the steel tines off the reel. First it will NOT help the feeding. You will find out why slat reels are only used in tall standing crops. Second you will destroy the wood bats trying to rotate the clips to remove the steel tines.

So adjust the header height lower, lower your reel as low as you can safely lower it, and make the rock guard. That is about as good as you will get. Hope for a taller crop next year.

Take a hi-speed grinder and grind the edge of the auger flighting square again. Makes a big difference on grabbing the beans. I did it on a JD 220 and helped a lot.

Thats what I had to do in 1983 on a new F3 Gleaner with a 15 ft flex head....Due to drought the double
crop beans were less than 1 ft tall...However a timely rain came and they were loaded with pods that
filled out....

They wouldn't feed in so my local elevator gave me some old leg belt....I mounted it to where it was
3-4 inches below the reel teeth...It worked great sweeping the beans off the guards..Those beans made
18-20 bu per acre..I would have loved to had beans 3 ft tall like that

Have had soybeans which would not feed very well, so I can mostly share from that perspective since I have not had entire fields full of short beans to contend with...............just mostly pockets. I hope some others will chime in on my thoughts to help give you some more experienced direction. I do remember at the annual combine clinics hearing the "combine doctors" mention just what one contributor suggested in grinding the edge of the auger to give it a square, sharp edge to grab the soybeans. Running the cutter bar as low as it will go will help to make the step up to the auger as flat as possible so they don't have to "climb" up on the tins. Set your reel as low as it can go. I remember from those clinics there was mention of setting the platform cutter bar down on a solid wood block and moving it up to the "0" position on the indicator. From that, you know just how low you can set the bottom end of the reel adjustment. Where I am about to go is where I cannot say I have experience in making short beans feed, but have had experience in making poor feeding beans feed much better. We combine at a bit of an angle with additional benefits of minimizing "pushing" of the platform and bunching up of material at certain points on the cutter bar. We also will take a narrower cut and drive faster to help "force feed" them through. Taking the equivalent of one row less and driving faster will help to push them into the auger. I can remember cutting the most short soybeans ever in 1993, which was the year that was cold and wet. We had short beans in the low pockets of our fields that year where water tended to pond. Some of the dealers were going through plastic tines on reels like there was no tomorrow. Farmers were adjusting the bottom end of the adjustment to their reels right down to where the cutter bar was cutting off the tines. You don't have the plastic tines on your machine, like we had on our 7700 with the 220 flex head. We never resorted to lowering the reel! I do remember combining a lot of crop that year that fed through in wads. If one wad came in with a delay until the next wad, it was at least tolerable. Most of the harvest that year sounded like, "WHUMP................WHUMP," then a delay until the wads started building up again, then a repeat of "WHUMP..................WHUMP." In those instances where they both came in about the same time, the feeder house was plugged and we had to get the leather gloves out to pull all those soybeans out of the feeder house. I will add, worn out rasp bars will complicate things because they will not "pull" them into the machine very well either.

Duct tape! Run it across the fingers, front and back- making it like a bat reel. You"d be surprised how long it lasts.

Run at a slight angle and keep the header full. The crop will push itself in better. I like the duct tape idea. Try it first on the back part of the field where the neighbor's can't see. Lol.