Wednesday Harvester

John Deere Titan 2 combine harvester. One of my customers bought one of only about six that came into the country. He made a big thing about his new combine locally, about how modern it was, how many acres he was going to cut in a day and how much he spent on it. Then he put it into the field!!!

We all laughed at the results and told him it was John Deere's answer to a total farm system, it cut and threshed the crop and replanted it out the back all in one operation. It just did not work in our conditions of long, damp straw and heavy crops.

The dealer took it back and sent it back to the States along with the others that had come over. John Deere learnt a lesson that others have learnt before, different farming methods do not always transfer successfully to other countries.
John Deere Titan 2

Farmers around here that owned one now have red ones or yellow

So educate me on this please. Obviously there are combines that do work in your conditions. What is the difference between this one and the ones that do work?

Between the rough looking crop & the plume in her stack, it looks to be struggling a bit. Were the Twin Rotor from New Holland & the Axial Flow setup from IH better at handling wet, rank crop conditions over a standard cylinder? How about a spike tooth cylinder like what would be found in a thresher?

Mike

A lot of water has gone over the dam since then but IH had trouble with threshing in tough wet conditions the rotors would wrap up in beans. There was a guy in the thumb that made a rotor that got the name the Baxter rotor that seemed to work in those conditions in the IHY combines. Don't know anymore than that about it. I know tough damp straw will not feed good in any combine I have had anything to do with.

The IH Axial Flow has been the best and most successful but not until they redesigned the rotor. I was with the IH demo team, the first year they brought it in, not as part of the team but because I was working with Claas at the time and IH was trying to turn IH/Claas dealers away and onto the new combine. We were all staying at the same hotels and so we all got together in the evenings to discuss how the day had gone. No rivalry, just a group of interested service people talking about how our respected days had gone. If the crop was dry and the day warm, our Claas machine could not live with the Axial flow, (Dominator 96 and 106), but as soon as the dew came down or the crop was a higher moisture, roles were reversed.

The other problem the Axial Flow had was a poor header rather than a cutter bar, to cope with the crop. The Claas has its feed auger further back behind a hump whereas the Axial Flow had the feed auger close to the knife, this meant that the auger was grabbing laid crops before it was cut and pulling it up by the roots.

For one of my friends, I drove an old Claas Dominator 85 against a new Axial Flow combining grass seed and the IH boys gave up and went home.

The following year IH had modified the rotor, grates and header and it was a different story. I went to Doncaster on a course and became a free lance instructor on the Axial Flow combines doing courses and problem solving for farmers all over Eastern England.

New Holland, Massey Ferguson and John Deere all tried rotor machines in England but all gave up, none were sold until they had had further development. They all now perform happily over here but crops have changed a bit too in that we do not have the same straw height that we had in the past and a spray with Roundup helps mature it.

Beater bar drums have performed well on combines since they were first used, Claas, New Holland and Ransomes pioneered the 'Rotary Separator' or 'Twin Drum' type design and these have been, and still are, highly popular. Massey lost a lot of ground until they went in with Drononberg (sp) and produced a more European style of combine with stepped straw walkers, rather than the relatively flat ones in the original Canadian designed big combines.

John Deere sent a friend of mine overseas to help set up combines that were sent over to Europe. Would have been in that time frame. He said they didn't know how to set a combine to work properly. He claimed success, but he was one of those guys that knew more than anybody else, so maybe - maybe not.

A few yrs back my niece was riding in the combine, JD. Titan, that her husband was operating, she was pregnant and they were trying to come up with a name if the baby was a boy, yes it was and they named him Titan. At his now young age he and his wife own AG-HUB MIDWEST in Iowa.

That's interesting, about the IH/Claas connection. Sounds like they might have been a formidable team.

Thanks again for recounting some of your history. That must have been quite the adventure, travelling around & working on the new Axial Flows.

Mike

I find the IH Deere combine interesting since the findings you mention are similar to what the farmers were telling us about getting wheat out of the head up in MT at the time. They would have problems with mornings and later evening cutting with the Rotaries not getting the crop out of the head yet the Deere machine was getting the crop out of the head for another hour in the morning and in the late/afternoon/evening as the moisture set in. Some of that could have been the operators in the machines alos. I know we would speed the cylinder up a bit in the morning and then slow it down and then speed it back up in the late day/evening to help with white caps or hulls in the bin. We were cutting in the field next to some Ih machines one day in CO and it was a hot dry day and they were packing our lunch till they got to something in the far side of the field or something boss said they had to slow right down then. Don't remember what all now since I was not in the field but in a truck.

(quoted from post at 02:46:31 11/29/23)
<img src=https://www.yesterdaystractors.com/cvphotos/cvphoto167658.jpg>

John Deere Titan 2 combine harvester. One of my customers bought one of only about six that came into the country. He made a big thing about his new combine locally, about how modern it was, how many acres he was going to cut in a day and how much he spent on it. Then he put it into the field!!!

We all laughed at the results and told him it was John Deere's answer to a total farm system, it cut and threshed the crop and replanted it out the back all in one operation. It just did not work in our conditions of long, damp straw and heavy crops.

The dealer took it back and sent it back to the States along with the others that had come over. John Deere learnt a lesson that others have learnt before, different farming methods do not always transfer successfully to other countries.
John Deere Titan 2

Click to expand...

I have bought an 8820 and I am in west of France, very similar or worse conditions than UK. I also have an MF860. "Rough crops" is usually between 8 and 11ton / ha. (That is 170Bu/ac)
To make it simple, the 860 works really well, while the 8820 was bad.
The makor thing is that the MF has the high inertia cylinder, the front beater with a better feeding, and most importantly, a wheat only concave.
I took out the 8820 concave, welded 2 extra bars between the first 3 bars on the concave, and now, she is in business.
Before it was completelty impossible to tresh triticale.

A Claas from the same time is solely made for wheat, it is for instance possible to engage deawner plates from the outside of the combine in about 15s, on the old Senator, Mercator, etc.... in the 60s.... Now, I prefer to run the old Deere or MF because it looks cooler, but for sure a good Claas 118 or a good TF46 (fitted with Australian concave) is twice the combine of an 8820 in tough wheat.


Edit: In France, many 8820s were sold, because they were good combines in corn, and corn is more important. Many is a big word, but they were there. Maybe between 50 and 100. I have seen personally 7 of them. Most of them were fitted with an aftermarket "thisthle screen" with very long steel fingers made by moulet. It improved chaff distribution on the sieve.
The 8820 would have performed better if it had the same front stratification pan as an MF860, and a cleaning fan with an air inlet in the middle (like the Massey or other European combines of the same time.)

This post was edited by fdt860 on 12/01/2023 at 03:07 pm.

Axial Flows are made for the young married farmer. The combines with the early straight bars are a sure way to be home on time for supper!