Beefed-Up Cylinder Boosts Combine Efficiency

Beefed-Up Cylinder Boosts Combine Efficiency COMBINES Accessories 26-5-3 Without much effort, you can upgrade your conventional combine cylinder to do a better job threshing and with less energy and reduced grain damage, says Gerald Foster, owner of Sunnybrook Welding, Sunnybrook, Alberta. Taking a cue from the Class/Cat Lexion conventional, Foster designed what he calls a "high inertia" combine cylinder in an attempt to make other combines as productive as the Lexion. Foster's cylinder has more weight at the outside - which gives it more inertia and keeps it turning when other cylinders with a higher proportion of their weight toward the center would slow down. The Sunnybrook 32-bar cylinder depends on the cylinder tube itself for structural support rather than a central shaft. Rather than the usual 8 or 10 bars, the Sunnybrook cylinder has 32 staggered reversible rasp bars. Because the cylinder is truly enclosed, it can also be reversed. Foster had the Prairie Agricultural Machinery Institute (PAMI) at Humboldt, Saskatchewan, test the Sunnybrook cylinder against a standard cylinder in a Deere 9610 combine. The PAMI study showed the Sunnybrook required 17 percent less power to operate with the same grain load. Load sensors on the concave showed a more uniform flow of material through the cylinder with the Sunnybrook design. Foster says the staggered bar design is responsible for the more uniform flow. With the staggered bars pulling the material through, there's less bunching and less force generated by the mat of crop material. That makes for better, faster threshing with less grain damage. And at the same time, the construction of the cylinder itself means it doesn't bend or flex as much as an OEM cylinder in a heavy crop, claims Foster.

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