Re-thinking the NH276 Baler Tine Bar

This issue is now heavily on my mind.

It's getting toward the end of our haying season, and we are setting ourselves up for the end of this year and future years with a "New Holland 552 Baler"... As in, we now have two New Holland 276 balers.

We used to run a 269 with a thrower and a 276 setup for baling on the ground... but we're retiring the 269... putting its thrower on the 276... and we just bought another used 276 with a thrower.

No machine is perfect, and with nearly 50 years of history behind the 276... I think that many would agree the Achilles heel is the tine bar.

It's not the tine bar per se... it's just the catastrophic cascade of failures that result from something as simple as the rice tooth flipping up.

The rice tooth (the spring loaded double tooth on the right side of the tine bar) flips up, digs into the metal at the top of the chamber... stresses the driveline... and then all "H" "E" "double toothpicks" breaks loose. From this simple issue, you could end up fixing...

-A 200 dollar stub shaft into the tine bar gear box (which can get bent)... along with all of the bearings and seals needed for replacement.
-A 130 dollar sprocket on the side of the plunger gear box (which can lose teeth)
-A 130 dollar "primary chain" from the plunger gear box to the stub shaft into the tine bar gear box (maybe just fix, not replace... but it will break)
-A 700 dollar tine bar. This is a killer, since the rice tooth seems to have a steel mounting pin through a casting. The casting on the 700 dollar assembly breaks, not the three dollar pin holding the rice tooth...

Usually, the knotter shear pin will save the knotters and needles. But they are definitely at risk, because breaking that primary chain decouples the plunger and knotter... there is now no timing relationship.

The new (to us) 276 has telltale holes in the top of the pickup chamber that tell me it's done the same thing at some point.

I notice that my brother's New Holland 575 baler, which has a rotor fed system, instead of the tine bar, has something as simple as a shear pin in the rotor feed. You lose a shear pin if something goes wrong, and the rest of the baler lives to bale another day.

Me? I can't afford a 575. I also can't afford to blow a grand every time something as simple as a rice tooth flipping up.

Why can't I just re-do the top of the pickup chamber with some sheet metal, so the rice tooth can't reach it? It would look odd for sure... it would need to follow an arc set by the tine bar track... but I'm willing to have an odd looking baler.

Why not just hinge the top of the chamber over the tine bar and open it up when the baler is running? OSHA might not like me... but it's up to me not to stick my hand in a running baler...

Heck... why not just cut the top of the chamber open and leave it that way? Nothing to catch on.

Or... buy a couple of new rice teeth and devise some sort of "breakaway tips" that will move hay but just break off, if they hit the roof of the chamber.

I don't like the idea of making the rice tooth's mounting "breakaway"... I would rather not run an entire rice tooth through the plunger/knotters... that seems to be changing one catastrophic failure into another.

Either way... something is getting modified... what do I have to lose, other than a ticking financial time bomb.?

Or... somehow making the tinebar drive chain the equivalent of "shear pinned"... it seems odd to me that the tinebar drive chain is the strongest drive mechanism in this drive chain... and it's at the end of the drive chain. If this chain broke, what's the worst that can happen? A broken chain.... unless this could result in the front teeth of the tine bar in the plunger chamber. I don't like that idea either.

It's really that rice tooth itself... or its mounting... or whatever it can catch on... that needs to be fail-safed.

There should be a slip clutch for the pickup by itself as well as another for the whole machine. These
need to be burnished and properly set each season. If you don't, bad things happen. When I pickup a big
slug of hay, the pickup will stop turning or go real slow until it is cleared vs the thing blowing up in
one way or another. With your catastrophic failures on the 269, that clutch should have been spinning...
It would be well worth your time this winter to go line by line in the manual in the preventative
maintenance section...

(quoted from post at 12:02:17 10/01/21) There should be a slip clutch for the pickup by itself as well as another for the whole machine. These
need to be burnished and properly set each season. If you don't, bad things happen. When I pickup a big
slug of hay, the pickup will stop turning or go real slow until it is cleared vs the thing blowing up in
one way or another. With your catastrophic failures on the 269, that clutch should have been spinning...
It would be well worth your time this winter to go line by line in the manual in the preventative
maintenance section...

Click to expand...

I haven't had catastrophic failures on the 269, other than PTO driveline stresses when the pickup got worn down. It's slip clutch has also activated quite a bit.

Now... our 276? The pickup itself has a slip clutch that has activated.

These tine bar crashes, in my experience, aren't directly correlated to the baler ingesting a slug of hay. I've put plenty of slugs of hay into this baler that slip the pickup slip clutch... without tine bar crashes.

Furthermore... the pickup slip clutch? That's separate from the tine bar. The tine bar has no dedicated slip clutch, shear pin or other failure isolation mechanism. If that rice tooth jams... the stress of that jam is instantly transmitted all the way back, through a very, very expensive series of components... all weaker than the chain and gearbox that drive the tine bar. To the plunger gearbox.

There IS a main slip clutch on the baler... but that... is on the input to the flywheel. That's not going to stop that plunger gearbox instantly.

Whatever energy is in that flywheel will get transmitted to the tine bar drive system, until the shear pin pops...even then...whatever energy is stored in the mass of the moving plunger is still transmitted to the tine bar drive... and, in our experience... the popping shear pin doesn't prevent..

-Teeth breaking on the primary chain drive sprocket
-Bending the input shaft to the tine bar gear box
-Breaking the primary drive chain
-Breaking the tine bar itself
-Breaking the knotter shear pin (thank God).

This isn't something that a slip clutch on the PTO input to the flywheel can save. There is already enough stored energy in the system to destroy these parts well before that slip clutch activates.

I've studied these tine bar crashes on this forum and others. People recommend running the 276 at 80% of rated RPMs... because it's not due to ingesting a slug of hay... it's due to the tine bar slapping back and forth. That rice tooth is spring loaded. On the back stroke, if it randomly hits a little pile of hay... and it's moving fast... and if it really pops up? Kiss a grand good-bye.

But, running a baler at 80% RPMs isn't good for it either. They are designed to have energy stored in the flywheel to minimize stresses on the PTO input during the hay compression phase of the plunger stroke. They are also designed to have kinetic energy stored in the plunger mass, to minimize the stress on the plunger linkage during the compression phase.

If you think you're babying your baler by running it really slow? You better also be making really soft bales, because tight bales require these energy storage mechanisms that mathematically depend on the square of the input RPMs.

This post was edited by lastcowboy32 on 10/01/2021 at 12:54 pm.

Think of it this way.

A tine bar jam is like stopping the plunger...without the plunger brake...

That's the amount of energy transmitted between the plunger gear box and tine bar... before any shear pin, slip clutch... or anything has activated.

I havent been around an older NH baler in 25 years so I am no expert. How well would hay feed if you either eliminate this rice
tooth or shorten it so it is less able to do damage? What is the cause of this failure ? Maybe replacing this tooth and possibly
drive chain as a regular maintanance procedure instead of waiting for them to break would be the easiest option. I can say that
when I repaired a NH 275 baler a couple times for a neighbor years back the underlying cause of broken needles and other mayhem was
always worn and or stiff (from rust) roller chains .

The only time I have had a problem with the tine bar was when my hired man got in a hurry and took the RPM's up too high. He made an
expensive mess by trying to save a few minutes. Stay below 540....I stay well below 540 with my NH276.

(quoted from post at 08:28:59 10/03/21) I havent been around an older NH baler in 25 years so I am no expert. How well would hay feed if you either eliminate this rice
tooth or shorten it so it is less able to do damage? What is the cause of this failure ? Maybe replacing this tooth and possibly
drive chain as a regular maintanance procedure instead of waiting for them to break would be the easiest option. I can say that
when I repaired a NH 275 baler a couple times for a neighbor years back the underlying cause of broken needles and other mayhem was
always worn and or stiff (from rust) roller chains .

Click to expand...

I'm all for regular maintenance. I'm also all for figuring out if I can eliminate a glaring chance for a really expensive failure that regular maintenance may not prevent.

After thinking about this since this post. I think that my best option is to hinge the cover over the tine bar mechanism and flip it up when baling.

There is a reason that there isn't any shear pin between the plunger gear box and the tine bar, and that is, timing has to be preserved both to make good bale shape and to ensure, as much as possible, that the lead teeth will never be in the chamber when the plunger is passing through.z

So, any solution where I try to create a shear-pin like mechanism is getting tossed.

I'm going to go with good maintenance as the first level of protection. The second level of protection will be to create a way to flip the cover up and out of the way only when baling; so there is nothing for a flipped rice tooth to catch on. That way, if something goes wrong with the rice tooth... I'll see some odd bale shape to give me some warning... instead of the baler doing a TURD "Totally Unexpected Rapid Disassembly"

We never ever ran a baler at 540 ever and never had any
issues making 75 pound bales

Could you make the sprocket two pieces with a shear pin ?

I'll take your word for it. My comments are:

A. Even if I don't run the baler at 540... I don't want it to be a high risk for failure at 540. We bale a lot of small fields. We turn around at the headlands a lot... in that process, we sometimes turn the PTO off... we turn it on... we shift gears... we adjust the throttle... If I get back onto a row and mindlessly set my PTO rpms to 540... instead of 520... and the baler does a TURD... that's not a good situation. There should be some margin of error there. 540 is the standard operating RPMs. The machine should be able to operate there, even if someone wants to run it more slowly for margin.

B. YOU may not have had problems with 75lb bales; but the people piling them would beg to differ... I'm a farm boy through and through, since I was a kid. And I'm not handling a couple thousand 75 pound bales in a day...

I would rather not mess with the sprocket. I would probably do more harm than good.

Switch to John Deere. Don't they use auger feed? They also are never supposed to make a banana bale. So I am told. Also, the New Holland 273 and 310 have a totally different carriage type feeder, with the six aluminum tines.
Does the 276 make a 16"x18" bale or a 14"x18"?

Garry

We had a stack wagon and the heavy bsles work better on
them . I didnt mind handling em after we didnt have a stack
wagon either . Now I like 60 and 65 pound bales you can
haul one in each hand to the trailer and not kill yourself

VERY TRUE that running any baler slower than 90% of 540, especially an older one is VERY hard on the driveline. May as well take the flywheel off. The sheet metal is just eyewash. Go ahead and modify it to how it works for you.

(quoted from post at 17:29:59 10/04/21) Switch to John Deere. Don't they use auger feed? They also are never supposed to make a banana bale. So I am told. Also, the New Holland 273 and 310 have a totally different carriage type feeder, with the six aluminum tines.
Does the 276 make a 16"x18" bale or a 14"x18"?

Garry

Click to expand...

276 makes a 14" x 18" bale. I have two 276 balers now, and one of them allowed me to bolt the 54A thrower from my 269, that I'm parting out, onto it. Same size chamber.

As far as switching to John Deere? I have nothing against John Deere. I have friends that have a couple old (guessing at model #) JD336 balers. They make a good bale and use the augur system.

New Holland is just "the devil that I know." I have all the manuals for both baler and knotter. I now have a spare set of knotters off of the 269 that I'm parting out. I have friends that I work with that have a 269 and a 273... so I can share some parts from my menagerie with them. The 276 balers that I have will do maybe another five years or so for me, at least. I want to run two for redundancy. Maybe after that I'll look around for a couple of old JD balers. I don't ever see me having 40k to dump on a new square baler. Our fields are also too wet for doing round bales. Leaving straight line ruts from one year to the next isn't that bad. If you run the same direction every year, you don't get jumbled around.

Our friends that run round bales on our type of land ruin fields.

Every place that they go into the field with the loader to make 3 point.... 5 point... or whatever point turns... to stick the round bale and then put it on a trailer... they become little asterisks of ruts that run every direction; at random places in the field.

I hate baling fields that have been done like that. The only solution is to go in and spot-disc or spot-till ... or just plow the whole darn thing up.

Every form of harvesting has its place. For me, it's small squares.

I was just passing along an observation. The only time I have had a problem with damage to the tine bar in my NH276 baler, in the last
20 years and thousands of bales, is when the hired driver ran the baler at above 540 RPM. That messed up the rice tooth, the rollers and
the track. And cost me about $500 in repairs.

(quoted from post at 07:25:54 10/05/21) I was just passing along an observation. The only time I have had a problem with damage to the tine bar in my NH276 baler, in the last
20 years and thousands of bales, is when the hired driver ran the baler at above 540 RPM. That messed up the rice tooth, the rollers and
the track. And cost me about $500 in repairs.

Click to expand...

I get what you're saying. Even the 276 manual has this very odd statement: (paraphrasing)

"The plunger is rated at 79 strokes per minute at 540PTO RPM...the absolute maximum plunger speed is 80 strokes per minute..."

And then somewhere, it also mentions that you should consider putting throttle limiters on the tractor to prevent going over 540...

To me, New Holland left very little margin for error for the operator.

I don't want to run my 276 above 540. I also don't want to need to install throttle limiters on my tractor(s).

If I can do a little modification to the baler to reduce the chance of failure and/or reduce the cost of a failure... and buy me a little margin of error... it seems like a good idea.

I want to say that I appreciate everybody's comments here.

I'm not the type to sit down and read a manual for the heck of it. I need to have some questions, even to have someone challenge an assumption that I've made; then I'll go and read with a purpose.

Every comment here, whether I've followed it or not... has lead me to questions that have lead me to look through my manuals to see what's up.

In the end... I think that it will make our "New Holland 552 Baler" (2 New Holland 276's) run effectively for us at an aggregate speed of about 140 plunger strokes per minute

I don't want to just beat the rain by the skin of my teeth anymore. I want to be done baling and unloading... and have time to sit down with a bottle of hard cider and eat supper at sunset... like a normal human being...

Showcrop, I remember reading something that you wrote about energy storage in the flywheel; and that stuck in my mind.

I got a real world example of it a couple of weeks ago, when the pickup went in our 269. The pickup didn't fail, it still worked; but it was turning so hard that it was eating up all of the flywheel energy; especially during PTO off/on cycles when we turned around on headlands. With a "healthy" baler; you can come off of a row at full RPMs, shut the PTO down; and the flywheel will run long enough to still be spinning when you turn around... you can then throttle down and turn the PTO back on at the lower RPMs... minimum stress; and then throttle up to go onto the next row.

Without that energy storage, we broke the PTO driveline in two different places during about 1200 bales' worth of baling; and both times, it was at turn on after turning around.

Years ago there was a fellow named JD seller on this forum. He was very very knowledgeable about equipment. He posted several comments
about a NH276 baler being one of the best ever built buy New Holland. You might want to go back into the archives and search JD seller
and 276 for his comments. He actually sold his 300 series New Holland balers and re bought 276 models. He also suggested running them at
slightly lower RPM's. There are some interesting and worthwhile reading about 276 balers in the implement archives.

Thanks, and I DO run mine below 540; when I look at the tractor's tachometer.

When my daughter runs any baler, I tell her to set the tractor tachometer about 100 engine RPMs below the 540 symbol on the tach. That's about where I run. That would be at about 85% to 95% of full rated speed. Plus, we make 35 to 50 pound bales, depending on packing density; so we're not slamming the plunger to create an ultra-dense bale. My oldest brother turns 70 this year; and he helps unload wagons. I'm not going to sock 75 pound bales at him. He wants a workout, not an early ride to the ER

When we DID have problems with the tine bar, it happened twice, over the span of about three weeks a few years back when my father-in-law was baling for us. He loved the 276, thought it was a high capacity baler... and it is... just not as fast as he was pushing it. I timed plunger strokes a few times when he was running; and he would often run at or slightly above the upper limit. He also wouldn't throttle back or shut off, while turning on headlands... often trolling the headlands for a little missed blob of hay here or there. Recipe for disaster.

After I fixed it twice, and asked him to please run just a little slower he throttled down. I still have to fix the bent tine bar gearbox input shaft on that baler. It runs; but that whole stack of sprockets wobbles with the shaft bend...

He's been easier on the 269 in recent years. He felt bad about the 276.

I cant help but think something is wrong or missing or
something I cant think that new holland would have sold
something that just would randomly explode every so often

(quoted from post at 12:09:50 10/08/21) I cant help but think something is wrong or missing or
something I cant think that new holland would have sold
something that just would randomly explode every so often

Click to expand...

As outlined above, we've had two incidents with ours.

The first time was sneaky. The baler had
-broken main shear pin
-broken knotter shear pin
-broken main drive chain

It wasn't until I replaced the main drive chain and went to time the tine bar that I noticed a ding in the roof of the feeder chamber and a broken spring on the rice tooth. I replaced the spring and the little stop clip that keeps the rice tooth from flipping over. Re-timed everything, put it all back together... baled about 1000 more bales..

Until it happened again. This time, you could see distinct holes in the top of the chamber, where the rice tooth and embedded itself. The end of the tine bar that holds the rice tooth was broken out, and the rice tooth was laying in the chamber.

I bought a whole new tine bar assembly that time...

We haven't had an issue since, but we have been more careful.

But now, we bought another 276; and I see at least one set of holes in the feeder chamber roof...

I know where those came from.

Maybe its a combined wear thing... the spring, the stop clip... the chain that drives the tine bar... maybe all of them get a little loose over time.

Maybe the whole assembly should just be replaced after x number of bales. Messicks lists them at about a grand right now. That's some expensive regular maintenance.

I'm all for maintenance, keeping things ship-shape; but when you look at it, even with a brand new tine bar, it's a pretty light spring and just a little stop clip that keeps that rice tooth down, and at the apex of its back stroke, there isn't much clearance between a flipped up rice tooth and the top of the chamber.

When this was on my mind a few years back, I thought about trying to embed a little tiny cable inside that spring... to let the spring do its thing, but act like an absolute stop, in addition to the little clip. I also thought about just replacing that spring every year, just for the sake of it.

(quoted from post at 12:09:50 10/08/21) I cant help but think something is wrong or missing or
something I cant think that new holland would have sold
something that just would randomly explode every so often

Click to expand...

SV, from reading this forum going back years, I know that the tine bar is a weak point of the New Holland balers.