Air Seeder Built From Max-Emerge Planter
"It gives us the speed of an air seeder with the ac-curacy of a row crop planter," says Sam Ellis, Chrisman, Ill., who built an air-powered 24-row, 15-in. soybean planter with help from his sons, Bob and Roger . He used it for the first time in June to no-till 600 acres of beans into untouched corn stalks.
The one-of-a-kind rig consists of a Hiniker 5800 air seeder mounted on top of a 30-ft. Rawson coulter cart with a modified Deere 7000 Max-Emerge planter trailing behind.
Ellis mounted 24 stripped-down row units on a folding toolbar he made from 7-in. sq. steel tubing. He removed the planter boxes, finger pickup units, drive chains and driveshaft. Seed tubes from the Hiniker air unit drop seed directly into the Max-Emerge seed tubes.
A friction drive wheel runs against one of the coulter cart's tires to run the air seeder's seed metering mechanism. Ellis uses a 160 hp Deere 4755 tractor to pull the new-style planter.
"We had been using the Hiniker air seeder with a cultivator to plant beans but we weren't satisfied with the seed placement and depth control. The Max-Emerge units give us precision seed placement. The combination of the air seeder and planter row units gives us the best compromise we could find between planting and drilling. We already had the planter, coulter cart, and air seeder so it didn't cost a lot to build. Although it looks complicated, it's really a relatively simple planting system."
One of the things Ellis likes best about the new planter set-up is that there's only one seed hopper to fill. He rented a special-built bulk seed truck with crane and used 2,000-lb. seed bags to fill the 60-bu. hopper. "It takes only about five minutes to fill the hopper," says Ellis.
He plants two rows between the previous year's 30-in. corn rows, placing seed 7 1/2 in. to the side of the row. In order to avoid problems with trash, he replaced the planter's standard 5-in. wide gauge wheels with 2 1/2-in. wide wheels from Kinze Mfg. "The narrow gauge wheels let stalks pass through better - we didn't plug up the planter even once," says Ellis. "Kinze uses the narrow wheels on their planter fertilizer attachments. The wheels are built as a 2-piece unit so we had to modify them to fit our planter.
The narrow wheels work so well in trash that we were able to leave all the row units in line instead of staggering them.
"We wanted to work up the ground in front of each row unit so we doubled the number of coulters on the Rawson cart and moved them in so that they're only 3 in. apart, with two coulters per row. Next year we plan to mount no-till coulters ahead of the row units that run in tracks made by the tractor and the coulter cart.
"We use a 12-row, 30-in. twin line Kinze planter to plant corn. We could use our æair seeder' planter to plant corn if we removed every other row unit."
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Sam Ellis & Sons, Rt. 2, Box 72, Chrisman, Ill. 61924 (ph 217 666-3474).
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Air Seeder Built From Max-Emerge Planter AIR SEEDERS Air Seeders (42B) 20-4-1 "It gives us the speed of an air seeder with the ac-curacy of a row crop planter," says Sam Ellis, Chrisman, Ill., who built an air-powered 24-row, 15-in. soybean planter with help from his sons, Bob and Roger . He used it for the first time in June to no-till 600 acres of beans into untouched corn stalks.
The one-of-a-kind rig consists of a Hiniker 5800 air seeder mounted on top of a 30-ft. Rawson coulter cart with a modified Deere 7000 Max-Emerge planter trailing behind.
Ellis mounted 24 stripped-down row units on a folding toolbar he made from 7-in. sq. steel tubing. He removed the planter boxes, finger pickup units, drive chains and driveshaft. Seed tubes from the Hiniker air unit drop seed directly into the Max-Emerge seed tubes.
A friction drive wheel runs against one of the coulter cart's tires to run the air seeder's seed metering mechanism. Ellis uses a 160 hp Deere 4755 tractor to pull the new-style planter.
"We had been using the Hiniker air seeder with a cultivator to plant beans but we weren't satisfied with the seed placement and depth control. The Max-Emerge units give us precision seed placement. The combination of the air seeder and planter row units gives us the best compromise we could find between planting and drilling. We already had the planter, coulter cart, and air seeder so it didn't cost a lot to build. Although it looks complicated, it's really a relatively simple planting system."
One of the things Ellis likes best about the new planter set-up is that there's only one seed hopper to fill. He rented a special-built bulk seed truck with crane and used 2,000-lb. seed bags to fill the 60-bu. hopper. "It takes only about five minutes to fill the hopper," says Ellis.
He plants two rows between the previous year's 30-in. corn rows, placing seed 7 1/2 in. to the side of the row. In order to avoid problems with trash, he replaced the planter's standard 5-in. wide gauge wheels with 2 1/2-in. wide wheels from Kinze Mfg. "The narrow gauge wheels let stalks pass through better - we didn't plug up the planter even once," says Ellis. "Kinze uses the narrow wheels on their planter fertilizer attachments. The wheels are built as a 2-piece unit so we had to modify them to fit our planter.
The narrow wheels work so well in trash that we were able to leave all the row units in line instead of staggering them.
"We wanted to work up the ground in front of each row unit so we doubled the number of coulters on the Rawson cart and moved them in so that they're only 3 in. apart, with two coulters per row. Next year we plan to mount no-till coulters ahead of the row units that run in tracks made by the tractor and the coulter cart.
"We use a 12-row, 30-in. twin line Kinze planter to plant corn. We could use our æair seeder' planter to plant corn if we removed every other row unit."
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Sam Ellis & Sons, Rt. 2, Box 72, Chrisman, Ill. 61924 (ph 217 666-3474).
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