Driving impression: Along with the extra Evolution models, the main combine news from Claas for harvest 2003 comes in the form of two hillside models. We operated a pre-production Lexion 430 Montana on a sloping spring barley field – to check out the effectiveness of Claas’s latest Lexion mountain-climbing system
Hillside combine designs may not represent a massive proportion of the market, but there are UK users who would work nothing else. And that’s enough of a carrot-dangler for most makers to want a nibble.
In Claas’s case, it’s more a matter of building a machine for growers for whom the firm’s 3D sieve system does not give sufficient self-levelling – hence the introduction of the two specialist Montana models earlier this year, the Lexion 430 Montana and Lexion 470 Montana, both with 1.42m wide threshing systems. In effect this gives the ‘hillside’ buyer both a walker and a rotary harvester choice, the 191kW/260hp 430 unit being a five-straw-walker machine and the 236kW/320hp 470 a twin rotor rotary. For now, Claas says this is the ‘Montana lot’, which means that hillside capability – levelling on up/down slopes of up to 6%, across slopes up to 17% – is not available on the firm’s six-walker harvesters or the flagship 480.
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