Home Built 400 HP Forage Harvester

Home built 400 HP forage harvester HAY & FORAGE HARVESTING Forage Harvesters 13-6-28 "It chops two tons per minute or up to six acres per hour and has saved us a lot of money," says Lewis Zimmerman, East Earl, Penn., who built his own articulated 4-WD self-propelled 4-row forage harvester using a 400 hp Cummins 6-cylinder diesel engine and a high-capacity silo blower. Zimmer-man uses his home-built rig to chop corn silage and haylage for his 90-cow dairy herd as well as to custom chop 1,000 acres of corn silage each year. The one-of-a-kind chopper is equipped with a 4-row New Holland header, a home-built cutterhead drum, a cab and stairs removed from a Deere 7720 combine, and high flotation tires. It uses a powerful 50-in. dia. New Holland model 25 silo blower to throw silage straight back into a trailing wagon. Zimmerman has three 18-ft. long, side-unloading 12-ton wagons. "A comparable capacity commercial self-propelled forage harvester costs about $115,000. We only spent about $30,000 including the cost of the New Holland head," says Zimmerman, who operates a dairy and custom silo filling business. "Before we built this chopper, we were using a Fox three-row pull-type forage harvester and two small worn-out wagons. Now, if we have a big enough tractor at the silo blower, we can keep all three 12-ton wagons busy. Articulated steering allows the chopper to turn in a 9-ft. turning radius so we can move around in small fields without knocking down corn. The 4-WD lets us go right through wet ground, and the high flotation tires apply less weight per square inch than a a pull-type forage harvester to reduce soil compaction." Zimmerman made the frame supporting the engine from 12 in. channel iron. He modeled his home-built chopping cutter-head after the cutterhead from a Deere self-propelled forage harvester. To build it he bolted small segmented knives to angle irons that are welded to an 18-in. dia. drum. The silo blower is mounted under the cutter-head and powered by a V-belt off the cutter-head drive, and the gooseneck spout was borrowed from a New Holland 2100 self-propelled forage harvester. The chopper's front tires, 30.L by 32, are the same ones used on late model Deere combines. The front tires are slightly taller than the rear tires (23 by 26), to handle the additional weight of the header. The hydrostatic transmission allows infinite speeds up to 17 mph. To unload, the driver presses a button in the cab which mechanically unlatches the wagon's draw-bar by means of a cable extending from cab to hitch. Wagons are hooked up manually. For more information, contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Lewis Zimmerman, Box 192, East Earl, Penn. 17519 (ph 215 445-6851).

To read the rest of this story, download this issue below or click here to register with your account number.