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My name is Bud. I live in Huntsville, TX. I was looking with interest at your website. It seems that you and I are going in parallel directions regarding rebuilding farm implements. I also just finished restoring the same baler. I'll try to give you a few tips that I discovered along the way. Hope this helps. My baler literally had a few trees growing in it when I found it and it was in a lot worse shape than yours. The first thing that I noticed was that the pickup reel was not extending the fingers reliably. I took the guards off and the track that the rollers ride in was really worn down. As a result, the rollers would jump out of the track. I fixed that by welding on a thin piece of strip metal to build the track back out to the original width. This is a very common wear point on these balers and should definitely be checked and greased regularly. Next, the plunger assembly had wooden slides that were very worn. I pulled the plunger assembly out through the back of the baler and removed the old rotten slides. I handmade new slides out of oak. The important thing to note while doing this is to get the new slides back to the original width. What happens with the old slides is that they wear down and some slop comes into play between the knife on the plunger assembly, and the knife on the bale chamber. This can really drive you crazy, as the bales will come out banana shaped and unusable. While you have the plunger out of the baler, be sure to sharpen the knife edges as this is really important. When you run into some tough grass stalks you want sharp knives as this takes away a lot of horsepower, believe it or not. The main point here is to get those blades to pass each other with a close scissor action without binding. The knotter assembly is well built and causes few problems as long as all the parts move freely. Be sure to note all the grease zerks,as there are a few that are easy to pass over. Timing is the important issue here, as the whole baler has to be timed properly, to work and avoid internal damage. The Yesterday's tractor implement board archives has several posts with timing instructions. The manual from New Holland is valuable also for this. The last thing to look at are the feeder forks in the grass chamber. These are aluminum and wear down fairly quickly. They need to be close to the original length in order to work properly. Also, you have to experiment with the spacing on the carrier bar in order to get them to feed the grass evenly into the bale chamber, to again avoid the dreaded banana bale. I made the mistake of making replacements out of steel angle. While baling I broke the main drive chain and the baler immediately got out of timing. What happened next was that the plunger knife came crashing into the feeder forks full speed and I ruined the knife blade and the feeder fork. I was very fortunate that nothing else was tore up. I now know why they make these out of aluminum as they will simply break off and the knife blade will usually survive. You can still get replacements from New Holland. I apologize for the long post, but I hope that these tips will help speed your work along.
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