25 years ago two things rocked the agricultural machinery world – the first edition of profi international landed on farmers’ doorsteps and Claas’ hybrid rotary Lexions were unveiled. To mark these important milestones we put a 480 in the field alongside one of the German firm’s latest Trion 750s
When it first broke cover in 1995, Claas’ Lexion 480 stopped everyone in the machinery world in their tracks. Here was something truly different – a twin rotor machine with the front end from a strawwalker combine. It wasn’t entirely unexpected that the German manufacturer would come up with something out of the ordinary.
Business owner Helmut Claas was known for his unconventional thinking when it came to engineering challenges as the company’s Commandor CS machines proved in the early ‘80s. Over their 15-year production run, these quirky machines with their eight laterally mounted separation cylinders in place of straw walkers enjoyed varying degrees of success and never really made the mainstream.
By the mid-1990s, farming was ready for something different. New Holland had had its twin rotor TRs out running for two decades and Case IH’s Axial Flows weren’t far behind that. But these two pioneers relied solely on the rotors to do the threshing which meant they could be a little bit ‘harsh’ on the straw and were limited in capacity in north western Europe’s heavy cereal crops.
Helmut recognised this and decided the best way to deal with the issue was to develop a hybrid. Taking the three-drum APS threshing unit from the firm’s time-proven Dominator and Mega machines, he and his team of engineers came up with a design that saw the straw-walkers chucked in the scrap-bin and a pair of longitudinally mounted rotors grafted in in their place – the Lexion 480 was born.
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