PARKBEG, Sask. – Leaf blowers are a common sight on farms during harvest. They are used to clean combines at night, before switching fields or when repairs are necessary. But Phil Simrose of Parkbeg took the idea one step further. Rather than blowing the chaff clear, he sucks it up and drops it on the ground, using a long hose on the exhaust end.
“It’s a blower-vacuum with a small gas motor on it. It works good for sucking chaff off and blowing it away from the combine. When you take off the front plate around the rotor, that’s just solid chaff. If you need to work in there, you just stick it in and clean it out first.”
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He wanted to avoid chaff blowing in his face.
“I put about a 15-foot hose on the discharge, just to blow the stuff away. It’s a light, flexible rubber hose. You don’t need it ribbed, but that was what I happened to have. I put a pipe clamp around it, then duct taped it (to the air exit end).”
Simrose now uses the stiff plastic tube that came with the unit as his intake, but he said he would like to have a flexible pipe on the suction as well as the exhaust, mainly to reduce problems with static electricity that builds up from the chaff running through the pipe.
“It’s pretty uncomfortable running it. The static is a little bit like holding the top of a sparkplug when you’ve got a little motor going. I’ve got to hook up a wire, just to discharge the static to the machine.”
A flexible intake hose would allow him to set the blower on the combine and hold onto the flexible hose, which he thinks would reduce his static troubles.
“And with the flexible hose on the intake, I can get it into tighter spaces.”
