Messick's
   Messick's   Parts Hotline   877-260-3528
My Garage Login
×
My Garage
Online Parts New Equipment Used Equipment Rentals Tools & Supplies Toys & Apparel About Us
Contact Us
Locations
Careers
Internships
Ordering FAQ
Tractor School
Current Advertisments



Awesome FAST sprayer | Raven Hawkeye | 2400 gallon, 120' Boom, Tracks!

Tags :  fast  |  fast-sprayers  |  precision-farming  |  raven  |  raven-hawkeye-system  |  sprayers  | 

Hey, guys, Neil from Messick's. I made a mistake on a video, a really cool one, and I'm totally bummed out about it. We shot this new fast sprayer that we were just out here delivering to a customer and accidentally plugged the microphones into the headphone jack. We shot this whole video and go no audio off of it at all. I'm going to narrate here a little bit about this machine, and you can watch some of the stitched in clips here in between. 

 

This is a really unique sprayer. We sell a lot of pull-type sprayers and a lot of self-propelled sprayers as well, but this one bridges the gap between the two and is something a little bit different that we haven't seen a whole lot of throughout dealership before. 

 

Probably, the first thing that you're going to be gravitated to on this thing is the size of the tank and the track system, the size of the boom, it is a big, big machine. The tank on this is 2,200 gallons, bigger than even a lot of the big large self-propelled machines that are usually around 1,500. That tank is supported by a track system underneath of it in order to help distribute the weight of this whole thing. The tracks are going to give you about 14 Psi of ground pressure, again, being less than a lot of self-propelled machines. The boom on this thing is 120 feet. It's right there with the biggest sprayers out there. 

 

A little bit more detail behind some of those things. I'm giving you secondhand information on this. I am not our sprayer expert, David here in the video has a lot more education and background and training on these things than I do, but just from a background perspective, the benefit of tracks on a big sprayer like this is, obviously, for ground pressure. It's when you're pulling these heavy things across the field, you're trying to prevent compacting the ground and a set of tracks like that will help do that. 

 

The tracks are a USA made set from Camso, so good local USA company if we need any support for them. Tracks on a machine like this don't wear like they would on a piece of construction equipment because you're typically in the field and you're going in straight lines. It's not so much of a maintenance item or undercarriage concerns like you would have on construction equipment. This is just a little bit different than that. 

 

The first thing you obviously would think of there would be Howe something like that going to steer. When you get to the end of a headland and you need to make a 180, you've got this big track frame sitting on the ground. There's a cool set up here that these actually steer hydraulically underneath the machine. When you go and you make your turn, the Raven system actually some steering angle sensors and stuff on it that will help rotate those tracks underneath the frames so that they're not dragging through the turns. 

 

With the amount of precision guidance stuff that's on this, the sprayer and the tractor actually steer independently of each other and are both feeding steering information into the precision guidance system so that thing is always kept online at all times. 

 

The boom that's on there is a 120-foot boom. The truss is pretty impressive. A little bit more weighty than what a lot of machines would look like, and you can see that and the rigidity of it here when David jumps up and down and can hang from this thing. It doesn't have a whole lot of flex in the boom which sometimes you'll see on some lighter ones so it's a nice rigid design. 

 

The coolest thing on this thing and the stuff that always impresses me about sprayers the most is just the amount of tech that can go into spraying on stuff on the ground. A lot of people would have very little appreciation for the lengths that farmers go to not put spray chemicals on their fields and any more amounts than what they have to. The expectation is that we're killing everybody out there but it couldn't be further from the truth with the lengths that we're going to here. 

 

This particular sprayer is set up with a Raven system on it. You have a monitor up on the cab that's running everything. Typically, we're going to feed a correction signal down to it in order to give it a exact location that it is in the field. You're going to feed a prescription map into it so you know exactly where certain chemicals need to go on that field. Then the Raven system is going to lay that stuff down as you go. 

 

Now, on a boom this big that's done with 96 different nozzles. This particular one is set up with Raven's Hawkeye system so every one of those nozzles can be turned on and off individually. Most sprayers would have a several section boom where you're shutting off 10, 15, 20 feet at a time but in the case of a system like this, every one of those nozzles every 15 inches down the boom can be flipped on and off. 

 

A neat thing you can also do if you're going to go out and do corn with those-- Normally, you're going to spray on 30-inch rows instead of 15-inch rows, you can just have the monitor automatically flip off every other nozzle so that you're dropping you're spraying the right place. Those individual nozzles then, because they can turn on and off on their own, can do a lot of unique things that a traditional sprayer can't. Say, when you go in through a turn, normally, when you go into a turn, the ends of your boom is moving a lot faster than what the inside of your boom is and so you're going to have different amounts going down at different places. 

 

With those individual nozzles that can turn on and off, they're basically going to pulse on and off at a really rapid rate in order to change the amount of spray that's going in, so you're on a constant pressure across your boom and pulse your nozzles rapidly in order to put out the amount of chemical that you want. When you go into that long-term with that 120-foot boom, your nozzles on the end of the boom are going to be staying on for a much longer period of time to put down that added chemical that's needed while the ones closer back to the machine are going to be pulsing on and off to vary the amount that's going down. 

 

Especially in your turns and especially with these long, long booms, it gives you a level of precision and limits the amount of chemical that goes down in the right places in a way that you just never could achieve with a traditional style boom so really cool stuff. 

 

Down that boom, you're going to see that there's five auto height nozzles hanging off the end. These are to automatically adjust the height and follow the contours of the ground. Their responsiveness is very, very cool. I could have stayed out here for several minutes just waving my foot underneath and watching that thing respond to those height changes. A very easy-to-use system. You set it and forget it in a lot of ways. 

 

There's a lot of technology and a lot of things that you need to know how it works and get set up in a machine like this, but once everything is configured and ready to go as the operator you're really just driving the tractor through the field and really only keeping it on course because, for the most part, you're going to follow lines from the precision guidance monitor. 

 

The machine is going to be steering itself, and you're just watching for those edge cases of a groundhog hole over here or a tree that you might catch somewhere out along the edge somewhere and those kinds of things, where the machine is really taking care of most of the rest of the work of contouring the ground and knowing where it needs to go and staying on line, so just absolutely amazing the level of technology that's working its way into equipment like this and the awesome things that we can do with it today. 

 

If you ever need any help on something like this, you're shopping for a piece of equipment along these lines, this is not my area of expertise. Guys like David here go to a lot of training and have a good educated background to know how to sell a piece of equipment like this to the right farmer and making sure it's going to pay itself off because you can't make investments like this for no reason. They need to be able to drive your bottom line ultimately in the end. If you're in the market for a piece of equipment, give us a call at Messick's, we're available at 800-222-3373. We're online at messicks.com 

More Articles

Field Sprayer Maintenance Tips

Hi, David from Messick's here with today's three-minute Thursday. Today we're going to talk about some helpful hints and tricks that'll help you with your sprayers out in the field. 

Field Sprayer Maintenance Tips

Hi, David from Messick's here with today's three-minute Thursday. Today we're going to talk about some helpful hints and tricks that'll help you with your sprayers out in the field. 

STOCK ORDERS PLACED IN:
7 : 4 : 19
WILL SHIP TODAY