Vicon HPC conditioner

[Lazy-Farmer]

I have been mower shopping and spotted an unusual conditioner. It’s the HPC conditioner by vicon. Never used or seen one in person and wondering if they work better than tines or if they were one of these good ideas that never worked.

 

[Sid]

I have been mower shopping and spotted an unusual conditioner. It’s the HPC conditioner by vicon. Never used or seen one in person and wondering if they work better than tines or if they were one of these good ideas that never worked.

Pottinger have various conditioners , rollers and tines that fit theirs.

Rollers are used for lucerne and red clover

 

[rusty]

The bottom roller was made of nylon type brisles and ran tight against the metal top roller. The idea was the aggressive action would strip the waxy layer off the grass resulting in fast wilting. I bought a second hand one about 15 years ago and it suffered a terminal failure on its first outing.

 

[devonboy]

We had a brand new one many years ago along with a front mounted one , which came from holland as an ex demo, probably the best conditioners of grass we,ve ever had for the effect. Had them for years until they finally couldnt be repaired any more, downside was they were a bit soft.

 

[Martin Holden]

They were developed about 25 - 30 years ago. They did a good job of conditioning rather akin to roller conditioners but were more expensive and used more power to run. Wide spreading vanes on ordinary finger conditioners did for the concept so they were very short lived.

 

[ED.D]

I too owned a vicon hpc it forced the grass through a 6-8mm gap if I remember right spread the grass very well and speeded up drying times. But as has been said it was built out of chocolate and soft chocolate at that. The discs with 3 blades they said would cut clean and fast but instead they found every foreign object going suffered wear on the tips only, I had the welds on nearly every disc crack it could dry grass but any saving made was spent fixing the damn thing. The best thing that happens was the dealer took it back.

 

[Cowabunga]

They were developed in conjunction with Aberystwyth Plant Breeding and Trawscoed EHF back in the day. This was before spreading conditioners became available for mowco's. The concept is rather different because the Vicon scratched or aggressively rubs the waxy layer off grass leaf's surface and compressed the layer of grass to be quite thin behind it, so requiring no subsequent additional tedding, unless it rained hard on it.

The downside is that Vicon always built their mowers with a bit less metal than ideal, and the nylon brushes didn't last that long before needing replacing. They were expensive machines to build and run, so the advent of spreading plates behind flail type conditioners finished the High Performance Conditioner off.

 

[deleted user 837354]

About as useful as Vicon's round balers of the same era... best avoided or sent in pieces on a slow boat to China.

 

[Cowabunga]

In their defence, the HPC did dry the grass very quickly indeed, saving 24 hours and a tedding over a conventional conditioner at that time, which was a considerable cost and time saving to offset its running cost.
I never had one myself but I did many thousands of acres with a trailed 3.0 Vicon mower which died about five years ago and needs a complete new bed.

 

[devonboy]

twas a good concept that worked but the engineering was what let it down.

 

[Lazy-Farmer]

Thanks for the info. I wasn’t thinking of buying the one I saw, just interested in the design as it was unusual.