Home Built Equipment Loads, Wraps Big Bales

Home built equipment loads, wraps big bales HAY & FORAGE HARVESTING Bale Handling (5) 13-1-16 Ontario farmer Doug Crown made his own big bale wrapping and handling system by rebuilding an old Ford truck and a junked school bus. Crown can load and wrap 120 bales a day and transport them back to the farm. He started with a 1967 Ford F700 truck which he turned into a heavy-duty loader that's fitted with a hydraulically rotated bale spear up front for wrapping bales in plastic. He uses the loader to retrieve bales in the field and load them up onto the frame of an International school bus which he converted to haul bales. He built the loader by first stripping the truck down to the frame and cutting away the rear axle. He shortened up the frame and then remounted the original truck rear end. "I reversed the steering, clutch, brakes and other controls. It's like driving backwards," says Crown who wanted the weight of the loader to be over the drive wheels. He reinforced the truck frame and made mounting brackets for his Massey quick-tach loader. The engine counter-balances the weight of bales on the loader. A second 5-speed transmission, installed behind the truck's original transmission, gears the loader down slow enough for close-in work. The home-built loader has hydrostaticpower steering, with power supplied by a hydraulic pump Crown powers off the front of the 330-cu. in. engine. The loader is fitted with a bale spear fashioned out of a truck axle. A rotating plate at the base of the spear is fitted with two short spikes. The plate rotates the bale around the stationary center spear to wrap bales with 2-ft. wide cling-type plastic. A geared-down hydraulic motor powers the bale-turning plate. Crown uses the loader to place bales on the converted 35-ft. frame of an old school bus. To build the bale hauler, he cut away the body of the bus - he uses it as a storage shed - and removed all seats. He built bale cradles on the frame using 2 by 4-in. sq. steel tubing, reinforcing the bale-holding frames with 2 by 2-in. steel tubing. Crown bought the old school bus for just $50 because it didn't have a transmission or a radiator. Crown installed the automatic transmission radiator from an old Ford car. "I didn't think the bus would have enough power with that transmission but it can go 40 to 50 mph hauling 10 round bales," he says. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Doug Crown, Rt. 1, St. Ann's, Ontario, Canada L0R 1Y0 (ph 416 957-7653).

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