How old is youre dryer

Exfarmer

Member
Location
Bury St Edmunds
Looks a bit like ours.
That control panel is almost pornographic to a one time control systems engineer such as myself. My favourite bit of farming.
Forget to switch one on and you can soon smell and hear a slipping belt and usually end up hoovering half a ton of grain out from somewhere to get it going again.
Put them all on in quick succession and you can see the lights dimming down in the village.

it is quite simple to wire them so that they can only be started in sequence. Luckily we had a real whizz of an electricain who did our set up. He was a good chap who taught me all I needed to know about electrics at about the age of 8 I could wire up most things.
Sadlyly our old 50 cwt Almet would struggle today.
Have a friend still regularly use their 10 tonne Alvin Blanch dryer from this period. They still use their old brick built silo's from this time too. I understand cleaning them out each season is the most popular job on the farm , NOT :):):)
 

DrWazzock

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
it is quite simple to wire them so that they can only be started in sequence. Luckily we had a real whizz of an electricain who did our set up. He was a good chap who taught me all I needed to know about electrics at about the age of 8 I could wire up most things.
Sadlyly our old 50 cwt Almet would struggle today.
Have a friend still regularly use their 10 tonne Alvin Blanch dryer from this period. They still use their old brick built silo's from this time too. I understand cleaning them out each season is the most popular job on the farm , NOT :):):)

Yes, there are certain interlocks between our starters which are intended to prevent damage. You can't run the bed unless the discharge auger is running. Fine for normal operation but a pain if you are just cleaning out the last few grains.

I had thought of fitting a simple automatic emergency shutdown system but never got round to it. The weakness with our system is that the elevator that takes grain away from the drier can't cope with the maximum output of the drier. It needs a light sensor in the output hopper so that when grain starts backing up it trips the discharge auger and drier bed motor. This would save considerable frustration though at the moment i have set a limit on the variable speed drive handle to limit the bed speed to the flow that can be managed by the elevator.

Dad was pretty good at firing up before he'd actually opened the weather door on the exhaust side of the output fans. Blew it off once. Took his eyebrows a while to grow back as well.
 

Roy_H

Member
Used to have similar aged one where i am until last year when it went up in flames which was no bad thing
I wished our A-B mill and mix had done that after it's first year, then it might have been replaced by something decent. God it was awful, the roller mill was never any good, the engineers were always coming out to work on it even from when it was first installed. We ended up abandoning the mill part and using a Bentall roller mill which we managed to fit on top of the mixer. As for the mixer itself , have you ever had to clean one out by hand when the chains break? I have it's a nightmare of a job ( On Christmas Day once!) Bloody awful thing.
 

DrWazzock

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Lincolnshire
I wished our A-B mill and mix had done that after it's first year, then it might have been replaced by something decent. God it was awful, the roller mill was never any good, the engineers were always coming out to work on it even from when it was first installed. We ended up abandoning the mill part and using a Bentall roller mill which we managed to fit on top of the mixer. As for the mixer itself , have you ever had to clean one out by hand when the chains break? I have it's a nightmare of a job ( On Christmas Day once!) Bloody awful thing.

Still running a Martin Markham mixer here with a Bental roller mill on top and also a hammer mill of unknown make. The mixer chains are quite fragile and of size which seems to be unobtainable. An 8 TPH Lainchbury elevator forms the backbone of the system along with a selection of augers. We also have an underground conveyor to bring grain out from under the 4 wooden 15 ton bins, constructed in the 1950's and requiring the last 3 ton to be hand shovelled across the flat floors to the hole along one side.

We have a little bit of everything here but not much of anything. It can do a perfect job but is quite labour intensive and low capacity. OK for a 200 acre mixed farm but the whole thing feels a bit like a working museum now. It seems too good to scrap when you look at the effort my predecessors and sometimes myself put into the installation yet really it's been superseded by much bigger things. Don't really know what to do with it all TBH. Keeping it running for now but it gets tiresome as you get older and less energetic.
 

SFI - What % were you taking out of production?

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  • 100% I’ve had enough of farming!

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Red Tractor drops launch of green farming scheme amid anger from farmers

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As reported in Independent


quote: “Red Tractor has confirmed it is dropping plans to launch its green farming assurance standard in April“

read the TFF thread here: https://thefarmingforum.co.uk/index.php?threads/gfc-was-to-go-ahead-now-not-going-ahead.405234/
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