Operate Baler—General Instructions

Avoid stopping machine during a tie cycle. Damage to the needles and knotters can occur.

Re-Baling Bales

When re-baling bales:

• Remove all twine from bale.
• Spread material out to avoid overloading the pickup, rotor, and feeder fork.
• If used, retract precutter knives.
• Drive slowly into material, only allow baler to take in small amounts of crop at a time. If a large amount of crop is picked up in wait until it is fed through the rotor and precompression chamber before taking in additional crop.
• Remember, re-baled crop is much more dense than virgin crop. What appears to be a low volume of crop going into the baler can create very high loads.

Driving

Do not disengage PTO while feeding crop into machine. Always operate machine at rated PTO speed (1000 rpm). Whenever possible let machine run for 3—5 plunger strokes without feeding material before shutting down PTO, this will allow for lower torque on the next startup.

Choose a drive speed that feeds crop smoothly and consistently through the rotor and into the precompression chamber. Excessive speed can lead to plugging of the rotor or precompression chamber; poor field cleaning can also result.

To achieve maximum bale density, flakes in bale must not be thicker than 50 mm (1.96 in.).

Operating the baler at a 1:1 filling stroke to plunger ratio maximizes the capacity of the machine.

Filling stroke to plunger ratio is displayed on monitor as Feeder Fork Ratio (see Baler-Main Page in Operating Baler Application section).

Start slowly straight on windrow.

In light or narrow windrows it may be necessary to weave machine from side to side for complete filling of bale chamber, as follows:

1. Position baler so windrow is near outside edge of pickup on right side.
2. Weave tractor gradually across windrow while driving forward until windrow is near outside edge of pickup on left side.
3. Continue this gradual back-and-forth pattern to maintain quality bale shape in lighter or narrow windrows.

End of baling

At end of job:

• Execute a tying cycle to last bale.
• Disengage tractor PTO.
• Eject last bale (see Operate Last Bale Eject in this section).
• Fold up bale chute (see Operate Bale Chute in this section).