Grain cleanup

#2 Reel speed should be slightly faster than ground speed. Too fast and reel beats out beans and too slow, they won't feed in very good.

#3 reel height. 510 has lever next to variable speed for reel cylinders, use it as the height of crop changes going across field. Set it so the crop feeds in without beating the crop down into the head.

#4 Check under the head and feeder house for leaks, ALWAYS USE SAFETY STOP ON CYLINDER BEFORE GETTING UNDER HEAD!!!!! !!!! Older heads don't always seal with feederhouse. Stuff rags in cracks or fill with caulking.

Do you have a chopper or straw spreader? Check threshed stems to see if all beans are taken out of pods. Have someone operate machine and walk along side and catch chaff coming out back end, see if beans are coming out the back. I set rear of concaves to width of a sickle section
If you have cracked beans in grain tank, rear concave is set too tight or cylinder speed is too fast. Hundreds of adjustments, make them one at a time and cut a little bit to see what changed. Takes a while sometimes, but time spent is more beans in tank. Chris

Are the beans shatting at the sickel?

You can tell this by if the beans are under the straw or on top.

If they are on top you don't have something set right.

First off what is your wind speed.To much wind is better than not enough so that you lift the material across the sieves and not carry the beans out with the straw.

How tight is your top seive? Should be about 3/8 to 1/2 inch.
I use my finger tips. They should just fit in the opening.

Crawl under the combine and look for holes if the beans are just under the width of the cleaning system.

Try to narrow it down to where the problem is and we can fix it.

How clean is the grain in the hopper?

No the only way to pluck the beans off the ground is one at a time with your fingers.

Gary

Shame there isn't an implement for it. I was thinking something along the lines of raking up the trash (there was a massey head that would do that, but we don't own one), and using something that has about as much suction as your typical shop-vac to pick up the grain without taking a lot of topsoil. Then something akin to a fanning mill (or the guts of a combine) to sift out the extra stuff and reclaim the lost grain. So, it'd be like adding a small grain vac to the combine to pick up what gets lost. For small-scale tests, I think enough vacuum to do a row or two could be produced by a small gas engine and a squirrel-cage fan like you'd find in the older propane furnaces.

I don't know. Maybe I'm just being really tight and stingy. But since we were pretty short on rain and the yield seems like it's gonna be about 20% short of what it was last year and we only farm about 140 acres on this place, I was hoping there was a way to avoid wasting so much of it.

Slow your reel down if you can and or speed up your travel speed.

Make sure your sickel is sharp.

It may look likea lot of beans on the ground but it takes 3 or 4 beans per square foot to equal a bushel to the acre.

And if you are losing beans after they are in the feeder house, fix the holes or leaks you should not lose any there.

Gary