The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
New models combine impressive features
As harvesters up and down the country work in the fields, manufacturers have unveiled new offerings and technology for bringing in the 2021 crop
The relentless pace of capacity and productivity increases and the introduction of new digital data technologies continue in 2020 with the unveiling of new combine harvesters.
Claas Lexion II
Having launched its latest Lexion rotary separation models last year, attention has turned to the straw walker machines with the introduction of three Lexion 5000 series (five walker) and four 6000 series (six walker) models.
At the heart of them all is a threshing and primary separation assembly which retains the accelerator drum at the front to speed up and spread the crop mat while taking out the loosest grains.
Next up, the 10-rasp bar threshing drum is 25% or 155mm larger in diameter than before, resulting in a lower peripheral speed for any given setting and a shallower curve to the concave with its 132deg of wrap – 7% less than before. This should result in gentler handling of more delicate crops while also reducing power demand.
After that, an all-new rotary separator drum has been introduced. At 600mm diameter it is the same size as the previous threshing drum design, and has 10 rows of fingers working over an adjustable grate with 116deg of wrap.
A beater transfers crop to the fourstep walkers, which are 600mm or 14% shorter than previously and operate without the overhead straw mat finger agitation drum of current Lexion models. The cleaning set-up has been upgraded to the Jet Stream employed on the Lexion “hybrid” combines with its six or eight turbine fans giving highpressure airflow to the sieves.
John Deere X9 Series
For its new top-capacity harvesters, John Deere has adopted a twin rotor system for both threshing and separation that is said to be capable of delivering up to 100t/hr capacity in a good crop.
A wide crop elevator transfers material from the cutting table – which can be up to 15.2m (50ft) wide no less – to the rotors, which follow the principle of the single rotor in the S-Series combines.
Despite being 20% smaller diameter at 610mm apiece versus 762mm, and 12% longer at 3.5m versus 3.12m, the twin-rotor arrangement provides 45% more threshing area than the singlerotor design and 80% greater separation area.
John Deere engineers have squeezed the higher-capacity components into a machine that is broadly the same size as the previous range-topping S790.
As on that machine, the rotors have distinct threshing and separation sections, the latter operating within a housing that has more clearance above the rotor so that the crop mat can expand and contract to free grain as it spirals its way to the discharge beater. New Holland CH7
Traditional drum threshing and rotary separation are brought together for the first time in a New Holland combine with the “CH” or Crossover Harvesting design.
There is just one model so far – the CH7.70 – and performance-wise it sits between the CX6 and CX7 as a mediumoutput machine. Regular and Laterale versions cater for flat land and hilly ground harvesting, respectively, and a 374hp FPT engine helps the machine deliver more capacity than the CX6 models despite sharing the same 600mm diameter, 1.56m wide threshing drum.
A four-lobe beater transfers the crop mat into the top of the rotor housing where it divides into a pair of contra-rotating spiral streams that are agitated by prominent radial tines on the 542mm-diameter, 3.45m-long rotors to extract the grain.