Outback Wrap
Harvest time in North Dakota means many things, to a surprisingly various set of people and businesses. Dealerships and their tractor, hydraulic hose, and equipment departments are all busy as can be fixing, repairing, and replacing the casualties of harvest.
Hydraulic hoses are often casualties of harvest. They don’t usually age gracefully with all the use they’ve had in their lives, and all the pressure that comes with conveying hydraulic fluid from the tractor
to the equipment, not to mention all the summer sunlight that makes them a little brittle.
Even if the hoses do work perfectly every time, the initial setup takes some practice and effort. Hydraulic hoses are usually uniformly black and they all look the same- unless their diameter is different. So, hooking up the hoses to the tractor usually results in a few mistakes and necessary rearranges until they are in the desired orientation.
An Australia native who transplanted himself to US soil named David Hedt is making headway in the world of American agriculture by inventing the Walkabout Mother Bin, and now, has debuted a tool that makes the initial setup of hydraulic hoses more efficient.
Fitting hoses sized ⅜” to 1 ½”, the colored polyethylene wrap takes no tools to install. It lasts ten years or more, claims the company, and if the length of years fits, would cost a dollar a year to use.
Most importantly for North Dakota equipment users, Outback Wrap works perfectly in temperatures of sixty degrees below as well as two hundred and twelve degrees above zero.
Coming in colors of green, blue, brown, black, purple, and grey, the hose wrap matches the colors that tractor companies use to mark their hydraulics on the rear of the tractor, and sometimes even on the levers in the cab. For instance, if you want to hook a certain hose on a baler to your Case or John Deere tractor, but you want it to be run by the first lever, then you could match the color of the wrap on the hoses to the color of the first lever. No mistakes, and no guesswork.
Who would have thought that bringing some of the Outback to North Dakota was possible? Hedt’s inventions are bringing heatwaves of change to the States.