Bale shredder - any ideas on which is the best?

[peclova]

We are considering buying a bale shredder and spreader for straw bedding in loose housed yards and for shredding big bale silage and feeding it along a feed passage. We use 4'6 rounds and square wrapped silage bales and 4'6" net wrapped round and 8ft 6 string straw (half Heston) straw bales. As we are only going to use a small (95hp) tractor I think we would be better with a trailed machine. we can load it with a JCB Loadall or Bobcat. I expect to have to shred and feed 4-5 bales of silage or hay a day and bed down with 4 round or 2 6 string bales of straw a day.

Does anyone have any ideas about the most suitable machine for this?

 

[Cows 'n grass]

I bought a Lucas Castor 60 earlier this year.


I haven't had a chance to try it yet but it should do everything you want.

 

[Chae1]

Don't think you will go far wrong with a Mchale.

 

[Fergieman]

Mchale or Kuhn. Pretty much the same machine.

 

[Yosemite Sam]

Kidd, my neighbours got one and has demo,d it to a number of other farmers who have all gone on to buy one

 

[Poorbuthappy]

Well you've got 4 replies and 5 machines to choose from!

 

[Cows 'n grass]

Well you've got 4 replies and 5 machines to choose from!

....and if you go and look at all these machines you'll struggle to find any significant difference.

 

[Rossymons]

We've got a Teagle for what its worth! They all do the same job to honest.

The saving on straw is huge

 

[mo!]

We've got a Teagle for what its worth! They all do the same job to honest.

The saving on straw is huge

+1

 

[marco]

Kidd, my neighbours got one and has demo,d it to a number of other farmers who have all gone on to buy one

Is it a silage feeder and straw spreader? I asked a while ago about the kidds and got no response . What model number do you know?

 

[slaney]

I'm going to buy a Mchale neighbour has one and says it's a great machine.

 

[sidjon]

We had a Lucas castor 60 , which caught alight in august which was the best thing it ever did, most unreliable peace of junk I have every owned (good luck @Cows 'n grass ) had a Kverneland on demo and have brought one and it better not breaking down any time soon

 

[peclova]

Interesting comments. Please keep them coming.

I had been considering a Lucas Castor but had my doubts. Although it looks good it is French, and from my experiences any French made machine has always seemed been overly difficult to repair - almost if it was designed to be so.

The Lucas was 4th on my list behind 3. Kverneland 2. Kidd & 1. McHale. I might be wrong but Mchale look as though they have made a machine which has copied the best features of the others.

 

[peclova]

We had a Lucas castor 60 , which caught alight in august which was the best thing it ever did, most unreliable peace of junk I have every owned (good luck @Cows 'n grass ) had a Kverneland on demo and have brought one and it better not breaking down any time soon

Can I ask: Which model and how much did it cost?

 

[DrDunc]

For silage as well as straw, the best machine is the Mchale.

When Mchale designed theirs, they looked at every machine on the market, copied the best bits, and then added a few excellent design features of their own.

To prevent blockages in long stemmy haylage, it has a blade at the bottom of the chute which runs against the edge of the flywheel paddles (copied from Lucas).

The feed rotor is started independent of the flywheel after it gets up to speed (belt driven, copied from kuhn). This prevent blockages because you don't need to reverse the floor of you don't completely empty the machine before stopping it. It also means a smaller HP tractor can be used to drive the machine.

The comb above the feed rotor is hydraulically moveable from the control box. This is useful for controlling the feed rate, and is essential for large Heston square bales of straw, especially if there is the odd mouldy section in the bale.

The flywheel has a unique manual unblocking system. In the very rare event that it becomes jammed, there is a metal bar that inserts into holes around the flywheel, allowing you to reverse it with the bar. The plug drops down, thenbought allowing the tractor to restart the flywheel with no drama. In over 5000 silage bales and several hundred tonnes of straw, I think I've blocked mine about three times. It takes a couple of minutes to get going again. My previous machine would block several times a year, usually breaking a shear bolt at the time. It could take hours of forcing the flywheel back with a wooden post pushed into the chute, swearing, sweating, and getting cuts from the comb knives to get going again.

The knives on the Mchale are serrated sections that require no sharpening. I find they'll easily do over 1500 bales of haylage before needing turned or replaced. With straight edge blades on my previous machines, they'd need sharpening every week, and replaced annually.

The feed rotor on the Mchale has large teaser fingers which aggressively pull apart the bale (very similar to Lucas). They don't wear out, unlike others that have triangular shaped sections welded between the knives. The triangular sections are fine in straw, but wear quickly in haylage use (and aren't designed for replacement, so you need a new machine).

The sides of the Mchale are high and taper out at the top. This is needed if you're spreading large square bales of straw, otherwise larger lumps will be spat out over the top. Other machines either offer greedy board extensions as an option. Some brands don't even offer these and you make a mess spilling out straw.





As an engineer, I spent a long time analysing which machine was best designed before I purchased the Mchale. There simply aren't the faults in operation and machine longevity which my previous blowers possessed.

For blowing straw only, any of the machines on the market do the job, but if you are using it to feed out silage and haylage bales, then only the Mchale offers all the best design features of the competition put together in one machine, plus unique features of its own.

 

[bigw]

We have a Kuhn which does a good job on straw but don't know how well it would handle silage bales. We will likely replace it with a McHale when the time comes so we can use it for silage bales too.

 

[Alf]

if you want one with a good s/h values . Go for Mchale , teagle or kuhn . The others will be worth way, way les when you part with it

 

[jackrussell101]

Teagle tomahawk 8100 here. Absolutely bombproof and is good value.

 

[bar718]

Only warning is if the chopping blades are double sided the reverse side is always being sharpened but never used so if you block it be very careful as its like putting your hands in a bucket of razors . We took the angle grinder to ours as too many sliced fingers , they may be different now as our Kuhn is over 10 years old .

 

[Serup]

I have a kuhn primor 3560 from 2000. trailed and with 2 shutes. We only use it for straw. We straw about 5-6 4x4 hestons every day and did for 16 years now. It had more than it's fair share of mouldy bales and stones from tedders and so on. It even caught fire once
It is a very reliable machine! The few minor improvements i think it needs are all made on the 3570. We ran a 70 hp 2wd tractor on it for 15 years without any problems. I highly recommend them!