quick fixes, bodges and creations

Robigus said:

I'm always suspicious of those bodges that look too neat and have a good coat of paint.

We used to grow about ten acres of broad beans for seed. The first year we got a contractor, who claimed he had done it before, to try and drill them, it wasn't a great success.

We looked at several drills but the beans are so large and flat that they will not flow and cant be forced through a metering mechanism.
We tried an Accord, a Vaderstad, an old Carrier, an old Massey and an even older Smyth. We tried spreading them to plough in but they broke the rollers in a Kuhn Aero and would not flow through and got cracked by various spinning disc machines.

The best system was the Smyth as it lifted the beans up and did not try to force them through a meter. Inspired by this cutting edge Victorian technology we built this Heath-Robinson affair to drill our little ten acre contract. The beans rest behind the roller which lifts them up and over and drops them down the chute. The rate is varied by using an old Nodet gearbox. I've no idea where the chains and sprockets came from and most of the sprockets are welded onto their shafts, so when something breaks we're jiggered. The seed tubes are 2" inch pipe and the whole thing is set on a 3m Vibroflex. It's even got hydraulic bought markers

The point is that we cobbled this together fifteen years ago so that we could drill ten acres of beans, but we have been growing broad beans since then and not only did we some times have nearly two hundred acres ourselves, but several other growers have borrowed it most years.

We bought a Mzuri this season and one of the essentials was that it could handle broad beans and then of course we went and gave up the broad bean contract. But the old drill is still going, two other growers have used it this year.

If I'd known it was going to be around so long I would have finished it of a bit better and given it a coat of paint.

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Tim G said:

Drilled a few acres of beans with that beauty myself, although I seem to remember a different gearbox on it at the time and of course the set of drag harrows transported on the rear step. I think we used it for a couple of seasons before building our own with a kraus seed box from weaving machinery's scrap heap. Might have a picture somewhere. Would have been better off building an attachment for the combine to hoover up all the pods that laid on the floor come harvest time though.

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jimmer said:

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jimmer said:

ever had one of those stamp your feet shout at the nearest person for no reason moments

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roscoe erf said:

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