DIDSBURY, Alta. – Time is always a factor when putting up hay. What better way to become more efficient than pulling two balers with one tractor? That’s what Dwayne Archer does.
Archer puts up 1,500 acres of timothy hay a year near Didsbury for export. He says he chose this style of hitch because he wanted it to be user friendly.
“We wanted to be able to road (the balers) down the road, go through narrow gates, make bales on either side of the tractor, plus pull optional pieces of equipment besides the square balers,” Archer said.
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“It’s a multi-use idea. We’ve pulled ReCons and two hay rakes as well. And it has the ability to do everything you want to do, from inside the tractor cab.”
Archer spent two winters in his shop, fooling around with different ideas. He hired a fluid power shop and engineer to help with the electric-over-hydraulic setup and had welding help when needed.
He started working on it in the late 1990s and now has five years of field experience with the hitch.
“It attaches to the tractor either with a three-point hitch or a drawbar receiver tube,” he said.
“In the last three years, we have more tractors on our farm with a three-point hitch and that’s the easiest way to hook it up and unhook it.”
About 2.5 feet behind the tractor drawbar are a 540 power take-off shaft, four hydraulic outlets and electrical for the implement. At the back of the hitch are another 540 pto shaft driven by the hydraulic motor, four electric-over-hydraulic outlets and electrical for lights on the implements. The system simulates the back of the tractor at two different points on the hitch.
“We have a pto shaft that connects to a small 1,000 (rpm), inch and three-eighths shaft, that runs an 80 gallon, two-stage fluid power pump. That fluid power pump is geared to accept 1,600 rpm from the tractor engine, so about 750 from the shaft, to produce the proper amount of flow. We can take a large tractor, idle it down and still get performance out of the pump and the motors,” he said.
“The pump is 80 gallons per minute. The two motors are 55 hp hydraulic motors and that’s what we hook either to the baler, the ReCon or the hay rake.”
The hydraulic outlets at each hitch can be used to raise and lower implements, swing the baler hitch from road to field position or adjust hydraulic pickups on the balers.
“The ReCon, you can shift the swath- forming shields from side to side and lift the ReCon up and down. We wanted to be able to do everything from inside the cab of the tractor.”
The main frame is made of 16 by eight tubing, with quarter inch walls. The axle is off the front of a Jiffy high dump, including the wheels, tires and hubs.
Archer built the three-point hitch and the housings to encompass the pumps as the project progressed.
The original plan was to have the frame of the hitch act as the reservoir for the hydraulic oil, but a misplaced decimal point put a glitch in the process.
“Our math wasn’t correct. The size of the tube should have been about 14 by 16 and we would have had capacity for 150 gallons. The rule of thumb in fluid power is, we have to have two gallons of reserve for every gallon we want to pump. We’re pumping 80 gallons, so we should technically have 160, so we had to add a reservoir at the back,” he said.
“It was tough to clean the inside out when we were done. We had quite a job flushing all the welding slag and stuff out of there. Once we did put oil in, I think we went through a couple of sets of filters right off the bat.”
Two oil filters are located at the back of the hitch, above the axle. Each stage of the two stage pump has its own filter. Archer said the hitch tends to get warm during the summer.
“There’s no cooler because we seem to be able to displace the heat with the surface of the hitch. If it’s 30 degrees at five in the afternoon and you’ve been baling all day, you’ve probably revved your tractor another 150 rpm up to keep the ptos at the same speed,” he said.
“We pump our under-pressure oil through 1.25-inch hydraulic hose, while the return is 2.5 inch. Those are rules of thumb as well. The return has little pressure and it’s big because we’re returning through the filter and not putting under pressure oil through the filter.”
The hitch includes a 12-volt source that is plugged in at the back of the tractor. A control box with electric switches runs all the hydraulic functions on the hitch, with the exception of powering the implement, which is done by the pto and the hitch’s own hydraulic system.
The control box with the switches stays with the hitch. When the hitch is connected to the tractor, Archer passes the control box through the back window of the tractor so the operator can use it in the cab.
The telescoping rear axle on the back of the hitch can be widened or narrowed hydraulically. To steer the hitch, Archer swivels that axle.
“It has a fifth-wheel style hitch for the axle. When we’re raking or pulling ReConditions, those are implements where the tractor is forced to straddle the swath. We needed that ability,” he said.
“When we cut with a discbine, our swaths are nine feet wide, the same width as the reconditioning rolls. We don’t want to drive on that swath. We want the axle to spread out as wide as possible. But when you pull an implement like a John Deere baler, with side intake, we narrow up our axle so it’s as narrow as the tractor, and again nothing drives on the windrow ahead of baling.”
Archer used a high dump axle and tall tires so he can drive over a dropped bale in the field if necessary. The hitch has about 20 inches of clearance under the axle to go over an 18 inch bale.
“As we pull into the field, we hit one of the electric switches to swivel the hydraulic hitch on the baler, from road to field. We would do that again for the second baler, then the third hydraulic function would swivel the axle so the second baler went onto a separate swath than the front baler,” he said.
“Then we engage the pto in the tractor, rev the tractor up to about 1,600 and start baling.”
The rear baler swings out, but Archer said the front baler also swings out to the side. He can drive the tractor beside the swath and not have to straddle it.
“You could (straddle the swath) if you were pulling Hesston balers,” he said. “When we pull rakes or ReCons, we straddle the swath. The second baler can bale on the right side or the left side of the tractor. But because we use John Deere balers, they’re both off to the right side.”
Archer said when swathing for the double baler hitch, he doesn’t do anything special that he wouldn’t do for a single baler.
“We pull dual rakes and dual ReCons, so two swaths always stay as if one machine made them. So when we bale, we try to stay on those two swaths so we don’t have to move the back baler around,” he said.
“If you’re on a side hill, you need to steer the back baler. You do that with a switch in the cab. Our swaths can be 19 feet apart and we can still pick them up, or they can be as narrow as nine feet.”
Archer said he uses a tractor with a minimum of 110 to 120 hp, but he has used a tractor with up to 255 hp.
“I don’t think we bale twice as much as if pulling single balers. It takes a bit longer to turn, maneuver or pick up a broken bale. It’s probably about 95 percent as efficient as two individuals, but we’re powering them with one engine and one operator.”
With materials and hired help, Archer said he probably invested $24,000 in the hitch.
“Because we bought our fluid power through him, the engineer was included as part of the package. I hired a welder for some of the welding, especially all the joints on the tank and the structural parts. And we hired a fluid electric engineer to put all the electric-over-hydraulic functions in and design a control box.”
With five years in the field, Archer thinks he has recovered those costs through increased productivity. Right now, the two-baler hitch is a one of a kind unit.
“We’ve been asked both ways, whether others wanted to copy ideas or if we’d custom build units. We would do either, but no one has shown up with a cheque yet,” he said.
“There are mechanical hitches available that do balers, and they’re half the money of this one. But you can’t transport your implements down the road without taking them apart.”
While the hitch is versatile, it won’t pull two round balers because the arch isn’t high enough, round balers require stopping to tie the bales and both balers would seldom need tying at the same time.
“And the 19 feet isn’t wide enough to accommodate two windrows of straw after you’ve combined, so it doesn’t get used to bale straw after harvest.”
