We're going to start at the front of the machine here. This machine, particular one is a 540 power take-off shaft. This machine is also equipped with what we call the drawbar swivel hitch. What that is, is it's a double gearbox, it's a gearbox on the gearbox here. Once hooked to your tractor through this latch system, you are able to turn at any angle and your driveline stays centered with the machine. What that eliminates is any driveline chatter and the possible failure of your driveline from binding from turning to tight. This will let you pivot in any direction eliminating driveline failure for you in the future.
As you come back through the machine, you'll notice it's standard equipped with road lights. We have a road light plug. The machine takes two remotes, two hydraulic remotes. One to open and close the machine, and the other one to raise and lower and tilt. As we come back to the tongue, you will notice the tongue has a bow in it, what that enables you to do when hooked to the tractor and transporting down the road the machine is centered down the road, makes it very easy to tow.
As our power comes through our driveline, it comes back through into our main gearbox here. At this gearbox, the power then is transferred straight down to the cutter bar to a drop shaft out of the bottom of the skier box or over here to our main drive belt which drives our rolls for our conditioning. Very little maintenance here.
We're here at the front of the machine of the Mow Max Discbine. As you can see we have a full piece metal hood. Underneath this metal hood is a plastic insert. Simply, what this does is it helps deflect rocks, so it does not ding the top your hood making it look much better for resale value.
As we come down here, we look at our Mow Max two cutter bar. Like I said, this is a steal on steel conditioning roll. What we have is you have free swinging knives on here bolted up onto our turtle shell. These little triangle pieces are what we call crop lifters. They help lift the crop up and into the rolls as they go through. In front of this is a cast piece which is our rock guard. This is our protection for our module. If you hit anything it's designed to hit the rock guard first before it actually hits the module and could cause our shear protection. Like I said, you can see it's a true modular cutter bar with a module here, a spacer in the center with a shaft in it connected to another module.
We'll go over here, and we'll look at a breakdown of the cutter bar and go into exactly what's going on inside this module.
New Holland's Mow Max two cutter bar is a true modular cutter bar. This is obviously, a cutout of a cutter bar. What we have here in the black part this is our module. Each module has its own oil bath and is connected together by a stub shaft to another module. As you can see you have your top cap which is the silver portion here bolted to our module and then the next part up is this black part we see here which is a shear hub. This is what's new in the Mow Max two cutter bar.
As you're mowing if you were to hit a rock or some type of debris in the field, this hub here would shear off of this splined shaft that would enable the disc to spin freely. What you would do then, there would be four bolts on the top here. You'd remove those four bolts, remove this top screw, and take this black piece out, which is this piece right here. This is a shear hub. You can see it's splined. We would insert that back down on this shaft here, bolt our hub back on and you'll be back in the field mowing within five minutes time.
This eliminates any damage to the internal gears of the module keeping it all externally out of where the oil is. Very foolproof, very efficient and will save you gobs of time and money.
Once the crop is cut from the cutter bar, it is then lifted up into our conditioning rolls. Like I spoke earlier, these are steel on steel conditioning rolls. You can get rubber on rubber or steel on steel. The difference is steel on steel is going to be more aggressive on the crop. If you have a long stemy type crop, this will crimp a little better on the material, but if you are running a leafy type crop like an alfalfa or a clover, this is a little too aggressive, and you will get a lot of leaf loss when baling it up.
As the crop comes through our conditioning rolls it has some options here as deflectors. If you're looking to lay your crop mat out as wide as possible, you would take this deflector here, move it down, the crop then we'll come out hit the deflector, drop straight down. Now we have our widest pattern we can. If you're looking to more windrow the crop, you'd move this up, move these shields in, it would deflect off there, drop down into a small wind reel.
If you're not getting the desired conditioning you're wanting, the condition can be adjusted right here with this crank knob. As you turn it clockwise, you're bringing your roll gap in the tension on the torsion bar across here on the rolls to keep them rolls, so they're not able to expand. You will get a much more aggressive tension on this. It's adjusting the tension on the roll, not the roll gap itself, but you can turn that down, crimp that crop, get much better conditioning.
We have on this machine as a mechanical header flotation by dual springs, one on either side. We adjust that up here at the top. You want your header to float on the ground. You do not want it all the weight on the ground, so you're driving it into the ground, you'll wear your skid shoes out too fast, but you can't have it too light. If you're seeing streaking conditions and your headers bouncing through, you know you have your header flotation too light, you've got to get it down on the ground. Adjust here on both sides with the spring.
Also, a little bit below that down here where we're at, this is our transport lock for our cylinder. If you're transporting it down the road make sure you install these transport locks. When you get to the field you can disengage it to let the header go down to the ground.
We here at Messick's, we're a full-service New Holland dealer for all your hay, forage, tractor needs, and construction equipment. New Holland makes many model Discbines ranging from 3-point mower hitch mowers that mow five feet up to 15-foot cutting pool type or self-propelled units. We here at Messick's stock a full line of Discbines from the small ones up to the big ones. If you have any questions, feel free to contact us at 1-800-222-3373. We'll be glad to help you with any of your parts, service or sales needs.
Hi. I'm Brian Messick with Messick farm equipment. We're here to talk about the quick change knife on the new 200 Series Discbine that New Holland just produced. This is about as quick and as simple as it gets.
