As drills get wider, they also get heavier, but a Lincolnshire farmer has found a clever way to get his tracked tractor to share some of the sowing load
Matching drill widths to other equipment in the fleet is always a head scratcher, and when AC Stubbs and Sons traded up from a 24m sprayer to a 36m Bateman RB35, Mark Stubbs knew he had to do something about his 8.0m Väderstad Rapid drill.
“A 9.0m drill looked to work best, but simply extending our existing drill wouldn’t have worked because of the press wheel configuration,” he explains. “So we decided to rethink the whole design.”
First step was to get the extra width in the form of some coulter frame wings, from local used machinery dealer Boccasion, which was breaking a 4.0m Rapid.
“By welding these on we could make the drill 9.0m, but I also needed to revise the seed heads as they were designed for 32 outlets rather than 36 outlets, and swap the coulter spacing from 12.5cm to 14cm. There was a lot of cutting to fit it onto the framework,” explains Mark. “But there was too much weight on the coulter frame – even with a 520hp Versatile tracklayer up front it was getting stuck in the middle in wet conditions.”
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