With their first in-paddock season now almost wrapped up, results from the much sought after Integrated Harrington Seed Destructor are in and the news is positive.
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With just 12 harvesters fitted this season in Western Australia in a controlled release to allow in-harvest evaluation, the results have been strong albeit with some teething issues, according to distributors, McIntosh & Sons.
McIntosh’s Devon Gilmour said the in-harvest testing had been invaluable and would lead to a better outcome for all owners down the track.
“We are spending a lot of time and resources not just making sure we get it really good, but spot on,” he said.
“We actually got questioned quite a lot about why we didn't release more from the factory, but we have absolutely made the right decision with 12 units which has been enough to test them from the northern parts of WA to the south and keep changing things as we needed to.”
In-harvest results saw the key component, the cage mill work well, but changes were made to components including the cooling package on some machines because of the throughput capacity of some harvesters.
Crop conditions with plenty of ground and stem moisture and frost damage also presented difficulties.
Canola was probably the toughest crop to go through the machines this season and oats and barley because of the dust going through the mill, Mr Gilmour said
“We started off in as green a crops as we would ever get and then the dust coming off frosted crops was amazing, so anything to do with weed seed control has been put to the test this year.”
He said conditions in greener canola crops were a test for throughput on the mill sieves but the iHSD handled the volume of material and ropey stems after adjustments were made to chutes to stop material build-up.
McIntosh was confident the first released units would perform, but found oil coolers were operating at maximum in what was generally a cooler harvest and so needed upgrading to handle more extreme temperatures.
“The oil coolers were ok because we’ve had a cool harvest, but they were operating at their peak, so to drop their temperature you had to drop the mill speed slightly, from 3000 RPM which is optimum efficiency, to 2700 RPM and that causes other issues in feeding and with chutes,” Mr Gilmour said.
To overcome the issue additional coolers were installed running in tandem with the original and others with larger capacity were also trialed.
An unexpected issue was sourcing suitable replacement parts.
“We identified the issues, knew how to rectify them, but found it hard going getting suitable components. - the oil cooler vanes need to be able to pass a lot of dust, chaff and straw,” he said.
An issue with the mill speed sensors was quickly overcome while the anticipated power draw on the harvesters also returned quirky results.
The iHSD was expected to draw about 58 - 73 kilowatts, but harvester operators said they didn’t feel that level of loss of capacity, Mr Gilmour said.
“We’ve got a bit of work to do to come up with some of the reasoning on why that is,” he said.
“Even guys who had the units from the GRDC last year had said they wouldn’t drain the power - so we've got work to do to test that.”
McIntosh is looking for harvest to wrap up so they can download on-board data to anaylse the performance more scientifically.
The 12 units were fitted to Case and New Holland machines and results were similar from both.
“It’s probably not so much about the brand as the model,” Mr Gilmour said.
“There’s also a range of different factors to contend with - some have got choppers fitted some have got spinners, so what we found with bridging of material above the mills is that what chute works for one model doesn't necessarily work for another.
“The result may be that we end up with two versions of chutes so they perform on each model and in different crop types,” he said.
“Starting up north and then coming down south has given us a good spread of crops and a lot of time to test in the remainder of the season - they’ll soon be operating in crops down at Franklin River for more testing yet.”
Feedback from the dozen lucky owners has been positive.
“Everyone has been pretty frustrated with the frost and we’ve had to be really careful with how much time we spent with the machines down managing and adapting things, but all the owners have been brilliant,” Mr Gilmour said.
