USED MACHINERY: Chafer ‘T’ and ‘E’ series trailed sprayers: Following a management buyout in October 2000, Chafer Machinery has continued to refine and develop its new trailed sprayer range. Of greater importance to second-hand buyers is the company’s support for older machines and its ability to upgrade these sprayers to meet modern demands. The trick, as James de Havilland explains, is to know exactly what’s on offer and how far the various upgrades can be exploited to modify a sprayer to meet a particular farm’s specific needs
Chafer sprayers were developed to apply both Chafer liquid fertiliser and pesticides. Typically hired out to farming customers, the resultant machines were certainly built tough although, despite that initial fert/spray dual-role intention, to many farmers the firm’s sprayers have always been associated far more with the handling of crop feed than chemicals.
Admittedly this early thinking did start to change once Chafer stopped sprayer hire and concentrated on equipment development and sales in the mid-80s. By 1990, the ‘traditional’ Chafer 2,000- and 3,000 litre ‘A’ frame chassis models had been replaced, the APS all-purpose sprayer chassis making its debut on the ‘T’ series The ‘T’ series subsequently shuffled aside for the ‘E’ line in mid-97, which, in turn, was itself superseded by the totally new Guardian ten years later in January 2007. In this article we will look at both the ‘T’ and ‘E’ series; our apologies to users of earlier ‘A’ frame Chafer models, but there is simply not enough page space to cover these machines, too.
When introduced for the 1991 season, the Chafer ‘T’ could be specified with several key options. From a second-hand buyer’s perspective, however, it is perhaps more mportant to know just what a particular machine has fitted now as opposed to what may have been available when new.
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