Neil Messick: Neil from Messick's here today. We're out today with a Kubota BV 4160 Round Baler. We're going to give you a quick walk around on this machine. Tell you a little bit of its heritage, where it came from and some of the features and the functions. Joining me in doing that is Anthony Rhodes here, my local Kubota hay tools rep.
If you know anything about Kubota's hay tools line, you would know that most of the pieces of Kubota hay equipment have their heritage in Kverneland or Vicon equipment.
Back in 2012, Kubota purchased a Kverneland Group, which we primarily knew here in the US as Vicon. Those pieces were sold as Vicon and, also, under a whole bunch of different manufacturers, painted different colors, but Kubota is now the owner of that company, the owner of all that technology and assets. Hay rakes, tedders, disc mowers, those kinds of things, you will see a lot of commonality with Vicon equipment. However, the baler is different, right?
Anthony Rhodes: Correct, correct. 2011, Kverneland started building this baler and selling it to Europe and all over the world. 2015 is the first year we brought it here to the US for retail sale. We made a couple minor changes to what they were selling at the time. For the most part, we brought it as it is. It is designed to do silage. Obviously, designed in a European market, so it's a heavy built baler from the ground up to put it in all kinds of different applications.
Neil: This is the BV4160, which is a 4 by 5?
Anthony: 4 by 5. Technically, it'll actually go up to 5 foot 5 inches in capacity.
Neil: Okay. And the other models are?
Anthony: We've got 4x6 balers. Actually, just this year, just launched a 5x6baler as well, which they designed specifically for our US market.
Neil: Cool. Am i right that the silage special baler, where a lot of other companies take a standard baler and beef it up to make a silage special model, Kubota hasn't done that, right?
Anthony: Correct. For the most part, this baler is pretty much what they would have sold into Europe. When we first launched the balers, we actually despect a few things. We took a solid scraper kit out of it, couple other things, to be able to compete with the dry hay builders here in the US. This one, this brand is Silage Special. It's heavy from the ground up, it's made to do silage.
Neil: We can take a dry hay baler and add scraper rolls to it and essentially have the same thing as the Silage Special model?
Anthony: Absolutely.
Neil: Right. We're going to work our way around the baler here. We'll start going from front to back. The pickup is obviously kind of the working bit of this. What can you tell us about the pickup?
Anthony: Okay. The first thing you're seeing on the outside, the thing I really like, the adjustment on the gauge wheel is very, very simple. Totally toolish, pull this pin, lift this down here, slide it out, pop it back in, and you're good to go. A really nice design on that. One thing we did when we came to the US market, we tried to spec out the balers to compete directly with what the major competitors would do, straight off the get-go. We went ahead and we put a 79 inch pickup on here as standard equipment. We put a hydraulic lift on here, standard equipment.
You've got to make sure if you're comparing this baler to the other colors out there, make sure you comparing apples to apples because we tried to put the premium features on here that you'd expect on all of our machines.
You notice it is a four tine bar pickup on this machine. We couple that with a feeder fork intake system. You'll notice the pickup is a little bit more lower profile than a lot of the competitors, it does spin a good bit faster. It takes a little bit smaller bite each time of that hay, but does a really, really good job of starting that bale, feeding it into the bale. I think you'll be really impressed with the performance of the pickup and the whole intake system on this machine.
Neil: One thing I've heard from other customers, when we flipped the hood up before, is that this looks complicated. Is there a lot going on here? I mean what does all this stuff do?
Anthony: Point number one, I think, you notice we're standing in the shade, number one. What we've done is we've taken this whole shield, we've got it out of the way. We don't have to take off a whole lot of other shields to get to the inner workings of the machine. You pop the shield on this side, you pop the shield on the left side, and you can pretty much see everything that's going on to diagnose a problem, to make your adjustments. Speak with one of your service reps this morning and he was really really impressed with how simple, really when you dig into it, it really is from mechanical point of view.
One thing you'll notice, everything about this baler, it's very, very heavy. Heavy sprockets, we use a 80 heavy chain, 80H chain, on these machines. Another thing that's really nice, we've put all of our electronic control in this box, it's on the baler. If, for some reason, the monitor or something goes out, or you need to switch it from one tractor to another baler, or something or other, everything is stored on this baler on in this box.
Okay. One thing that some people notice. We've got some sensors on this baler, you get a sensor here, you got a potentiometer here. This is your bale growth potentiometer. We've got one in the back of the tailgate, which helps us actually measure the size of the bale, right to left. It's a really accurate way to build a nice square bale on the sides. We've got another potentiometer that helps our net rep system to know where it's at. The nice thing is they're all interchangeable. We got three potentiometers, they're all interchangeable.
I've got different sensors on the balers. There's only two different sizes of sensors. When it really comes down to it, you've got a couple parts, or access to a couple parts, it's not really not that big of a deal. Notice the bale ramp here, standard equipment as well on all of our balers.
Okay. What does make this a Silage Special baler over a regular 4160 Premium? One of the things, like I said, this would have been standard equipment in Europe until we had it here in the US on the Silage Special baler. We have a driven scraper. The shaft here has four different ribs on it. You set it at approximately three millimeters away from your roll that's driving your belts and that helps keep that crop from wrapping around your rollers. You've got a second one down here in the tailgate, can't see it very well, but it's the same principle.
The other thing we put on our Silage Special baler is this proportional valve here. It's electric over hydraulic proportional valve. This allows us from the cab of the tractor, on our monitor, control the size and the density of the core, mid-range, and outer range.
Depending on the crop, moisture level, different crops etcetera, we could set a soft core, we can make it tight as we go out, you can max out all the way if you want to. It gives us a lot of flexibility and especially adjustability from the seat of the cab.
Can we talk about our net wrap system? The first thing I like to point out here, storage for our rolls and net wrap. You got storage for two rolls right on the side of the baler. Nice, low, easy to get to. Storage is right there. We use a front load net wrap system here. The steel bar you see here in the front is our net break. It is the full length of that row in net to apply nice pressure. This steel bar should last the life of the baler. It's not something we're going to have to maintain every year or anything like that.
Okay. To load the net wrap, very, very simple. You get in your tractor, push the unlock button, which unlocks the screen. This button you see right here, this is your net brake release. Push this button right here, see that blinks. When you push that button, it activates this electric motor, lifts this net break out of the way, so you can load your new roll and net wrap.
Okay. How do we build our bale? We use a floor roller here. This does the majority of the turning of our bale. We use these other two rollers in the front here, in combination with five wide belts. We use five belts, that are a little bit more wide than the majority of competitors. We also use a mater lacing, it's a German lace, in our belts on this baler. The 5160 baler, our cutter baler, does have endless belt. This setups worked very well the last three years.
Neil: If we can help you with any of our equipment needs, give us a call here at Messick's. We're available at 800-222-3373 or online at messicks.com
