He Built His Own 16-Row Corn Head

He Built His Own 16-Row Corn Head COMBINES Headers 26-1-27 When John Jensen, Ankeny, Iowa, heads out to combine corn, the grain really flies. Jensen bought a Deere 9750 STS combine and, after using it for one harvest, decided he could put a bigger header on it without overworking the machine's high-capacity cylinder. He was already running a 12-row head he'd made several years ago by putting two 6-row units together. "When I built that header, there weren't any that big on the market," he says, noting that the home-built head worked like it came off the assembly line. "Those old Deere corn heads are well-built and if you maintain them, they'll run forever," he says. "I ran the 12-row head for 19 years and it still worked fine." When he looked around for something bigger than 12 rows for his new 9750, he found nothing. Since he'd had such success building his own before, he figured he could do it again. A Deere dealer in Perry, Iowa, offered him an old 4-row head just to see if he could do it. Jensen cut the 4-row head in half using a 14-in. chop saw. Then he cut both ends off his 12-row head and added two rows from the 4-row head to each side. Before welding everything back together, he removed the old metal snouts from the four added rows and replaced them with poly snouts that match the ones he'd put on the 12-row head. He had to lengthen the feeder augers on each side, which was probably the trickiest part of the conversion. "Lining up the flighting and the tube took some doing, particularly since the flighting toward the center of the head gets worn more than out at the ends. When you get it lined up, you have to carefully tack it together and then weld a little on side, then the other, going back and forth from side to side, to keep it from warping from the heat of the welder," he says. He also had to add sheet metal to cover the opening where the throat of the old 4-row header had been. He replaced the drive chains on the head with heavy-duty #60 roller chain and had to add 4 ft. 7 in. to the hex shaft that drives the head. "I happened to have some of that shaft around from another shop project, so I made a coupler and added what was needed," he says. When he mounted the big head on the combine, everything seemed to work fine so he headed for the field. Running about 4 1/2 mph with the 16-row head, the 9750 was able to shell between 3,500 and 3,700 bu. an hour. "It kept two 1,100-bu. grain carts going all the time to haul corn away from it," he says. Extending the head by two rows on each side meant getting close with a tractor and grain cart was going to be tough, so Jensen added 6 ft. to the 9750's unload auger. "We might have gotten by with the auger as it was, but we unload on the go and I didn't want to take any chances," he says. He also had to lengthen his header cart to handle the wider head. He says keeping the head level might have been a bit tricky, except for the fact that his combine is equipped with a Contour Master system, which uses sensors to automatically level the head. This winter, Jensen's considering making a bigger planter. "I've been planting with a 24 row planter. The 16-row head worked okay on those rows, but it would line up better with a 32-row planter," he says. Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, John Jensen, 8889 N.E. 38th St., Ankeny, Iowa 50021 (ph 515 964-1261).

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