Pimp My Maize Drill

[cquick]

So I thought I'd post my adventures in pimping my Kuhn maize drill for the upcoming season.
I use the drill for maize, pumpkins and OSR, where I run ahead with a subsoiler and follow down the lines with the drill. Sort of like strip-till but not quite. I'd like to use it in a truly no-till fashion for the OSR eventually.

When doing the OSR last autumn I noticed the slot closure wasn't perfect, so over winter I've been looking up American closing wheel designs to try. Of course importing was out of the question because I'm a cheapskate, so I found some suitable hubs, made a CAD model inspired by the Mohawk wheels, got a local laser cutter to cut some profiles from 12mm plate, and gave it a try. Some pictures from testing today. I think the results speak for themselves!

Next steps: Make some custom seeding discs for pumpkins, find a suitable opening tine for direct drilling, and integrate the drill with AgOpenGPS (eventually planning on electric drive for each row...)



Excellent slot closure compared to the rubber wheels going direct into some very wet rye cover crop:

Tried some 'half and half' which could work in good conditions, but I think will take a lot more setting up to get right, compared to double spiky wheels.

 

[cquick]

This mornings project: Custom seeding discs.
I need to make up some pumpkin discs ready for spring, but I also made OSR discs last autumn with the same method.
Genuine seeding discs are about £80 each from Kuhn, so over 10 rows that gave me a nice budget to play with.
I had my designs laser cut from 1.5mm stainless and bought a 3D printer to print the stirrers. I still had about £300 left in the budget at the end!

The stirring lugs are printed from ABS-like resin and cost about 2p each. They are a press fit into slots on the disc, and also secured with CA glue.

If anyone else has a Kuhn Maxima, give me a shout as I can make seeding discs to your requirements. I could also design discs for other brands, if the concept is similar. They should easily cost less than £20 each.

 

[charlie@horizon]

Hi @cquick

Great work on those home build projects, I think 3D printers can be a game changer for farmers moving forwards.

Have you looked at Precision Planting components at all?

All Products | Explore equipment upgrades

Find upgrades and add-ons for your planter, air seeder or drill, sprayer, combine, sidedress, and strip-till fertilizer applicator.

www.precisionplanting.com

As the UK dealer for Precision Planting we can offer some awesome retro-fit options like Cleansweep, Deltaforce and Furrowforce which are designed to improve planter performance in scenarios like you're explaining. Furrowforce is certainly worth looking at; its a 2 stage closing system which collapses and closes the furrow walls with discs and then consolidates with a press wheel. The pressure can be adjusted by air in the tractor cab and if you want to get really technical it you can add a load cell and adjustments can be automated as condiitons change.

Feel free to drop me if you want to discss in more detail 07852794722

 

[cquick]

Stitching sunflowers into patches of flooded wheat this afternoon. I had some aggressive leading tines made up by Metcalfe at a very reasonable price.
In all I'm very happy with the job it's done - Now onto the maize!

 

[O'Reilly]

What was the original opening tine like?

 

[cquick]

What was the original opening tine like?

When new, not much more than a straight piece of steel. By the time I got the drill it was worn into a shape that was, if anything, trying to lift the row unit out of work.

From memory, the genuine Kuhn coulters were getting on for £100 each while the Metcalfe ones were about £20.

 

[buttercup]

How did you find 3d printing ?

 

[cquick]

How did you find 3d printing ?

It can be a bit of a faff at times, more so for me because I bought a resin printer, so there are a few washing and post-curing steps to do.
Very useful for small, accurate parts. Not useful for production in volume though.
You can find a used filament printer for very little money these days. If you're at all interested I'd highly recommend just getting one and playing with it

 

[deleted user 837354]

That Kuhn drill you have, you may have done this already in the the other thread, would it drill through a growing cover crop of mustard or similar?

 

[cquick]

It'll do it, maybe not into quite as tall and stringy a cover as this though!
The main issue was the rear wheels getting tangled, and where the rye was laid across the direction of travel it would ride over instead of cutting through it. A softer, less lignified cover would probably be fine though.

 

[deleted user 837354]

It will be really interesting to see how well this comes on through. That kind of establishment technique would save a lot of time, money and moisture in a dry year.

 

[Nailuj]

Nice updates!

I did something similar but went to a coulter disc instead of a tine. I was worried that a tine could throw to much dirt out of the row as we still go like 10 km/h when direct drilling with our Väderstad Tempo. The coulter disc let me reduce pressure on the drill about 40 % which improves sidewall compactions a lot.

It is great that you can convert almost any planter to direct drilling with just a few small adjustments.

 

[cquick]

Where did you get those discs?

 

[Nailuj]

You can get those at Monosem.

There are good ones from Yetter aswell, they would have had a factory mount plate for my Tempo, too. But they were double the priced, so I went with the Monosem ones as I didn't know if coulters would work at all.

 

[cquick]

Thanks! Roughly how much per row do you reckon it would cost? And do you have any issues with having to add extra downforce? I quite like the tine because it's not adding updraught to the machine

 

[Nailuj]

The coulters were about 260 € per row. I had a local metal worker building the mounts, don't know yet how much they are. The Yetter ones would have been 500 € / each.

I don't need more down force. The machine has 325 kg / per row from factory.