Home-Built Devices Make Bale-Handling A Breeze

Home-Built Devices Make Bale-Handling A Breeze BALE HANDLING Bale Handling (31B) 27-3-25 Ken Assenheimer of Barrhead, Alberta, handles a lot of square hay bales on his farming operation, but he does so with speed and ease thanks to two handy loader attachments. Assenheimer stacks bales with a home-built self-leveling accumulator that he says works much better than commercial ones. The bale hooks on Assenheimer's home-built model actually pull the whole tier together, closing the gap between bales. "The hooks go 90 degrees into the bale wafers so you don't ever drop a bale," he says. The accumulator is hinged on the top, so it self-levels when set down on the top of the stack, making it easier to use. Assenheimer also built a forklift device to handle his 124-bale stacks. He added an extra fork at the top of the mast on his 930 Cat forklift (20,000-lb. lifting capacity) and a push-off bar that helps unload stacks. The folding frame is fitted with two hydraulic cylinders. He can now move 1,600 bales in an hour. It takes only 15 to 20 minutes to load a truck (four 7-tier stacks of 124 bales each). "The stack mover is quick-attach. Two bolts, two pins and four hydraulic couplers are all that need unhooking before you can back away from it and go back to operating a normal forklift," Assenheimer explains. He says he has only $2,500 (Canada) invested in materials to make the unit, since he was able to salvage and repair an old, bent forklift mast. It took him about four weeks to build it and he says the reason he originally made it was to speed up loading and unloading of his large scale hay drying unit (featured in a past issue of Farm Show). Using it to load trucks when marketing his timothy hay was "an added bonus." Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Ken Assenheimer, Frontier Forage, R.R.#3, Barrhead, Alberta, Canada T7N 1N4 (ph/fax 780 674-4317).

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