Hay crimper

[McGuyver]

I am helping an Amish friend find an old hay crimper. He is old order & can not put an engine on it. So he wants to convert it to ground drive. How wide did they make the older crimpers? Would like an 8 footer, the biggest i found is 6. I cant find any info on specs. Any info would be appriciated.

 

[Kevin Happke]

Google: IH 33 Hay Conditioner.....where are you located?

 

[McGuyver]

Central Ohio, my biggest question how wide are they? 8? would be nice. 5 & 6? is allot of passes on a field.

 

[Kevin Happke]

Give me a call at 320-468-6474 right now kevin

 

[Kevin Happke]

The conditioner is pulled behind the mower....So you cut a swath with the mower with a grass board on it so a 7 foot cutter bar with the grass board makes it a 6 foot swath and then when you cut the next swath you condition the prior swath so it no extra trips over the field.......With the amish guy he may need to use 4 horses on the mower instead of 2 horses so one team would have to be in front of the other team.................

 

[JMS/.MN]

They"re usually made to handle a 6 foot swath behind a 7 foot mower. With a normal size swath, traction is likely going to be an issue. Bound to be a lot of plugging- and they are no fun to clean out with the rolls wrapped.

 

[Leroy]

I can tell you that you will never find what you are looking for as that was never made. The 9' cutter bar mower had not yet come into production when conditioners were designed. And by the time the 9" was brought out the mower-conditioners had taken over and at that time there was no market for 6' or less mowers so they would not make a conditioner for a 6' mower as there were no market for them. Every single conditioner ever made was designed for the 7' bar mower that was what was selling and it layed the swath in a 6' wide swath so that is why the rolls are 6' long. And the owners manual calls for 35 PTO HP to operate and in the type of hay the Amish make it would take all of it. Now to put enough traction on the ground to gain that horsepower would need to be able to use like a F-12-F-14 spade lug wheel in dual configuration with at least 1,00# weight on then to get the spade lug to penetrate the ground, Then unless he would use the rear end from that Farmall tractor he would need to be able to get some type of differentian so he could turn by putting those wheels on a fore cart and then a right angle gear box plus a high ratio step up gear box to get conditioners 540 PTO RPM speed and they will not work at partial speed as partial speed will make them plug. And to get a conditioner to work with that loaded up fore cart for the power it would need he would have to use 8 head of horses. He could make a fore cart out of that F-12-F-14 rear end to get the differential on an axle that would handle that size wheel and that would take care of the right hand gear box but at the horse walking speed he would still need a speed step up gear box. Pioneer Equipment over there in Holmes county could build something that would work. The factory is all Amish but they do use electricity in it but it is provided by large deisel engine to run their electric welders and when I was there they had an electric fan working on the counter. Most of the other machinery is hydrolic powered of a diesel engine as well. And they do make the steel wheels that they could get enough power out of off the ground to power a conditioner. But I would guess to build that fore cart the price would be oner $10,000. I have worked with the Amish in Indiana for years supplying them with Items they want that they no longer could find locally but were still avaible in the non Amish area of Ohio I am in. One I have delt with has a machine shop operated with a horse power made out of a Moline tractor rear end burried in ground with it set up for only one rear wheel to turn and that has the arm to hook the horse to and uses the pto to power his line shaft.He is the main place for the Amish in his area to go to muy or get repaired a horse drawn mower. But they use a hand powered washer and water is either hand pumped or windmill powerd. Now his cousion that I also worked with more than him has gas engines on everything that normally would be powered with an electric motor. I have furnished him withplows, disks, harrows, packers, rakes mowers manure spreaders, wagons, field sprayers, washing machines, even baby scales. And he uses a cell phone all the time in his construction bussiness. So I have gotten to know a lot of Amish pretty well over the years. And I know the type of hay they raise and when they cut it and it is in the catagorie of taking the full 35 PTO HP the owners manual calles for and I know it would be verry hard to get that much power out of something ground driven.Because it would be running over the fresh mowed hay would be way harder to get that much power from the wheels than for a binder or even a ground drive hay baler or corn picker because those are working off of bare ground.

 

[Hay maker2]

I have seen crimpers / crushers with Wisconsin Engines.
All they need is a cart in front of the unit for the guy to ride on and work the team.

 

[Brendon-KS]

I agree with you that the idea of a ground-drive hay conditioner just doesn't work out in the practical sense. Being ground drive doesn't reduce the power requirement of an implement - it only changes how the power gets from the "engine" (in this case, horses) to the point where the work is being done. Every step along the way must be capable of transmitting all the power that is required by the implement plus some extra to account for less than perfect efficiency. In this case, to transmit the required 35 hp from the ground to the implement wheels will require the same amount of traction as what is required by a 35 hp tractor to transfer its power from the wheels to the ground. As you say, this will require thousands of pounds of weight and large wheels to accomplish. Even if one would build such an apparatus I would expect that you'd need a lot more than 8 horses to pull it, though.

 

[Leroy]

He said an engine is out of the question because he is old order Amish. Some sects of Amish would do that but Old Order will not use power of any kind except hand or animal. Iwould guess you have never been around any Amish.

 

[Hay maker2]

(quoted from post at 17:38:47 02/08/20) He said an engine is out of the question because he is old order Amish. Some sects of Amish would do that but Old Order will not use power of any kind except hand or animal. Iwould guess you have never been around any Amish.

Yup, your right I have never been around the Amish. Apparently you know all, just because I am not from Ohio, does not mean I have never been around an Amish community.

Every Amish community have different rules that they follow. There's a group near me that are old world, everything is done by hand. Then about 20 miles away there is a group that sells Dewalt power tools and have gas and diesel engines to run everything.

I know of a settlement that they are allowed to have milking machines, but no power in the house.

Some groups can use cell phones and other groups can only use a landlines.

Then again, I would not know as you think I have never been around an Amish. And then there are Mennonites and the German Baptist . They are around me too. And lets not forget about the Hutterite (which are not around me)....

 

[MARK ROBKE]

Since no engine power, I would not even consider it. When they clog up(hay wrapped around one of the crimpers) you need a lot of power to discharge it. I recommend a tedder instead-less power required, and I think they are better suited to most hay. Mark.

 

[McGuyver]

Thanks for all the replies. He is convinced he can make it work.they come up with some amazing things. I&j in pa i believe nakes a pto fire cart. Still do not kniw if it can build enough speed.

 

[Leroy]

Being around them and knowing them why did you even mention the engine on a forcart knowing it was not an option, that is what I don't understand.

 

[Dan in North Houston]

We used a crimper back in the 70's , a NH 404 if I remember correctly. The crimper rolls spin at a pretty fast speed, and sort of suck up the hay from the ground. Of course, it was designed to run at 540 rpm pto speed, and the slower you ran it, the easier it was to plug. I would think that the step up gearing necessary to get it to operating speed would require a lot of weight on the wheels to keep them from slipping. I also think that it would difficult to get it started unless you had a provision to get it up to speed then lower it down to operating height.

 

[Adirondack case guy]

Most old order Amish around here use Grimm or Myers 2 wheel ground driven reel type tedders. More progressive order Amish use forecarts, or small engines mounted on equipment to operate haybines, tedders, balers and forage harvesters.
A crimper takes a lot of power to operate, and I doubt that any type of traction wheels would drive the rolls at the needed rpm without sliding.-----------------------Loren