The crop flows into Stephen Carpenter's combine faster and smoother since he installed his sickle blade-style grain grabbers. Carpenter had heard about "grabbers" that could be installed between auger flights to let the reel run higher for less shattering. The idea is to make the crop feed more evenly to the center.

"I didn't want to spend money for the real thing, so I thought I would try single sickle blades instead," he says.

Originally, Carpenter had the blades spread out between the flights. But prior to last fall's harvest, he concentrated them in the center to feed crop material more aggressively.

Carpenter cut out the fingers originally found at the auger center. He welded about a dozen blades at roughly the same spacing as the old fingers.