SASKATOON – When farmers leave behind big clouds of dust and foliage as they rake hay, they could also be leaving as much as 25 percent of their crop.
So McGill University students Jerome Robillard and Neil Barnett set out to invent a better rake. While they used computer simulations in designing one, they resurrected an idea from the 1950s.
“There’s no major engineering to make that machine,” Robillard said of the still theoretical side-delivery rake. The parts needed for the rake are used in currently manufactured rakes and combines.
Read Also
Advance payment changes called for
The Canadian Federation of Agriculture policy summit examined several topics the industry is dealing with right now, including trade, and saw a major commodity group rejoin the organization
The Quebec student spent the summer in Saskatoon working at the regional head office for New Holland farm machinery. He is returning to McGill, in Montreal, to complete his engineering degree and, he hopes, build a prototype of the rake which won him first prize in an American Society for Agricultural Engineering contest last autumn.
The more the merrier
In designing the new machine, Robillard and Barnett figured there must be some better way of getting more than 75 percent of the hay into the bale.
“With most rakes there’s a lot of acceleration and deceleration by the time it goes in the windrow,” he said. “With this design there’s just one acceleration so the damage to the crop is a lot less.”
The most common rakes on the Prairies use a series of rake wheels to grab, lift and sweep hay across the ground to form a swath fit for a baler.
Some dry matter is lost at each sweep, Robillard said, so the key to his project was to invent something to grab the hay and move it at a steady pace into a swath, without repeated handling.
“When the hay is flying, it can easily break. You want a gentle movement,” he said.
When poring through machinery archives the students found plans for a Curry Rake, a 1951 machine that uses a long, angled tyne-toothed belt to pull hay into a swath. The advantage Robillard saw was the steady pace at which the hay is drawn into the windrow, preventing the jolting and tearing typical to wheel rakes and parallel bar rakes.
The machine was never mass produced because early versions showed it had too many moving parts and was too difficult to repair, Robillard said. But by refining the design, the students hope a modern version could work better than the present rakes.
The rake belt and the tractor are set at an optimal speed and angle, but Robillard would not release this top secret information.
He said a major machinery manufacturer is interested in making a prototype of the updated Curry Rake and he hopes to begin work on it soon after returning to Montreal.
