End of Season Tips Keep Your Combine Harvest-Ready

A good time to look back on the growing season is while you give your combine a thorough postharvest inspection. Think about it this way: While you’re considering ways to improve next year’s crops, you’re taking steps to help ensure you do a better job harvesting those improvements.

Combine maintenance is one of the best ways to prevent in-harvest breakdowns. Worn components increase grain damage and decrease combine efficiency. Replacing worn parts is an excellent way to reduce grain loss, too. In fact, mechanical settings potentially are the biggest contributing factors to harvest loss.1

Inspect your machine now, while any issues are fresh in your mind. Your operators manual is the best place to start. Your Case IH dealer also can provide guidance — or handle it completely as part of a Case IH Certified Maintenance Inspection. Here are some top wear points that deserve your attention:

• Corn and grain headers: gathering chains, snap rollers, sickle sections, auger fingers
• Feeder chains: slats, chain rollers, chain tension
• Threshing components: rasp bars, concaves, other threshing components
• Clean-grain handling system: primarily auger flighting

Every stalk, stem, ear or pod that passes through your combine enters through the feederhouse. Efficiently and effectively moving all that material — plus enduring an occasional foreign item, such as a rock — requires a tough, reliable feeder chain adjusted to the optimal tension.

Check the integrity of your feeder chain bars. Bent, twisted bars can lead to a cascade of effects, including reduced feederhouse efficiency and premature chain wear or failure. Next, release the tension on the feeder chain and check the amount of play between links. Excessive movement between the links is a good indicator that it’s time to replace the feeder chain.

A preventive approach to feeder chain replacement can save time when you’re trying to keep harvest on track. Replacing the feeder chain usually requires dropping the combine header. Although that’s relatively easy with Axial-Flow® series combines, during harvest, there’s never a good time for time lost to repairs.

Feeder chains that last longer

Case IH feeder chains are engineered as the best fit for your combine and are manufactured with the highest-quality construction in the industry. Our slats are rolled, rather than laser-cut. This eliminates the stress points laser cutting creates. Case IH feeder chains come preassembled so they maintain consistent factory-grade torque. With Case IH feeder chains, you’ll replace your feeder chains less frequently, and that means more uptime during one of the most important times of year.

(The previous article “End of Season Tips Keep Your Combine Harvest-Ready” was archived on November 28 2017 via http://blog.caseih.com.)