Demo Kuhn Aurock

JDJ

Member
This thread is manly just for information, but it would be great to hear comments and opinions on the machine.

During the last days of our spring barley drilling an old friend now working at the Danish Kuhn import called me and asked if I was interested in trying their new model of a No till drill "Aurock"
I thought that could be quite interesting to try out a compare to our own Horsch Sprinter.


From the pictures I found on Google I didn't think much about it, but when it turned up is locked really well build, and heavy. 8,7 ton for the 32 Coulter version and 9,3 for the 40. It has a front tool bar with wavy disks to cut open to soil and a wheel packer and double disk for drilling. This demo unit also had a cross cutter in front but we didn't try to use it.

The machine has tow hoppers, which goes to their own distributions heads. It means that it will put seed and fert together but it also has a lot of neat options, your can close halfe of the outlets on the front hopper and the other half on the rear hopper if you want to drill tow different kinds of crops on the front and back row. Our you can even lift one of the rows up to have double row spacing.

It was quite high to fill our 6 meter telescopic loader can only just reach in.

At first it was surprisingly heavy to pull. The 240 hp New Holland was one it's knees most of the time only doing 6-8k. After lifting the cutting disk up from 8 cm from the previous demo to 4 it was a little better, and after taking some of the pressure of the seeding toolbar it was a lot better and it still managed to place the seed and fert in 3,5 cm.

We drilled in the wheat stubble and a pour cover crop established late due to the wet and late harvest in Denmark last year.

Jacob.

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Brisel

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Midlands
A lot of thought went into the design of this, as you'd expect from a company like Kuhn. I had a good look over the machine they took to Groundswell last year. It had a crop cutter front toolbar on it like this - forgive me for lifting this from Google, including the poor chap squatting in front of it...

1587115102286.png


I won't be trying one here because the front discs are too far ahead of the coulters and it will be out of line on my steep hills. It is also a shame that they've put the weight carrying wheels in front of the coulters, not behind them for slot closure though I can see why that would mean a total redesign of the whole chassis.
 

walk_aw

New Member
Just wondering what your thoughts were on having the press wheels following the disk opener - this seems counterproductive as you would think the pressure close the slot and be of little advantage to the following coulter. Also with such distance between the opener and coulter alignment could be an issue as Brisel says, particularly when traversing even shallow slopes.

Did you notice any of these potential issues?
 

penfold

Member
Arable Farmer
Location
Essex
Hello all,
My name is Will Waterer and I'm the mug in the squatting photo!! I work at Kuhn UK as a sales specialist for Non Inversion products among other things. So yes I am biased and make no apology for that, but I do believe we have a solution available to us now which can tick a lot of boxes for a lot of growers.

JDJ, I'm glad you were pleasantly surprised at the results on the demo. A fairly common reaction to be honest. As Brisel has said there has been a great deal of R&D gone into the Aurock to give us a worthy successor to the SD.

To answer the questions on the intermediate press wheels please remember this is a modular design so we can choose to have or have not, a lot of options on the drill. So yes, in a purely No-Till environment, you're quite right to say that the intermediate press wheels would serve no real advantage therefore you may spec a different option of purely transport wheels there.

However a lot of the interest we are having on this drill is from growers who want a versatile solution. For example a grower may be looking to move to Zero-Till over a number of seasons as their soil and rotation adapt. They may want to move the soil with a cultivator in certain situations (to achieve a chit for example, or a contractor who has some customers who want to Zero-Till and others who do not) but then not disturb the seed bank at time of sowing. For this scenario the press wheels serve the same purpose of firming up a moved soil seedbed prior to seeding much like on many Min-Till drills such as our Espro.

Another option is the Crimp Roller. Again no benefit if you have nothing to crimp!! I.e. you're not growing cover crops. This crimping roller's pressure upon the ground, can be adjusted on the fly from the cab. To adapt to different crop densities to achieve just enough to crimp but not cut, which in some situations can cause regrowth. However some other users do use it to chop corn stalks for example.

The following harrow is another option. For some this is vital, others believe its the last thing you'd want on there.

Single, dual, or triple product metering, again the choice lies with the customer.

Another option which many would see a great benefit from is our Vistaflow system. This allows us to select from the cab which coulters we want to send product to. So we could plant two different seeds at two different row spacings and/or different depths for example. We can also tramline at any tramline width, with any width drill. So gone are the days when you had to have a certain size drill for a certain tramline width. A great option for contractors working on farms with different tramline systems. Also you can select wheel widths, wheel centre width's and even chose the distance either side of the tyre for different crops. e.g. wider wheelings for broadleaf plants than cereals. We can also do tramlining by GPS so there is no need to work bout to bout. You can work in lands and still ensure the tramlines will be correctly positioned again regardless of drill and ortramline width. This drastically increases output.

So in summary, we go with the approach of listening to the customers aims and trying to offer the right solution for their individual requirements by speccing the drill accordingly.


I hope this explains a few things and answers some queries but if anyone has any further questions please don't hesitate to ask.

Kind Regards
Will.
 

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