Combines straw chopper on 1480

larry, We have a similar situation in HRW wheat. last year the straw was so long and thick that it bunched up in front of the cart tractor while we were dumping on the go! Rather than go with a chopper, which would seem to be pretty expensive, we bought the Estes "Disruptor" lug kit from Marvin Gorden. He suggested placing the lugs clear at the back of the rotor to avoid adding to the grain return. Take a look at the Estes page under the attachments tab for more info. We haven't run the machine yet, so I can't tell you how much it helps in wheat, but you can scroll down to September of 1999 to see a discussion called "Disruptor lugs installed in rear grates" talking about green stem beans. If the lugs can cut bean stems, I would think they would chop wheat straw easily.

larry, you need a fair amount of hardware to install a straw chopper in a beater equipped machine. First you need the gearbox that fits in between the separator belt driven pulley and rotor belt drive sheaves. When you get that installed, you need to check the alignment of the rotor sheaves when done. Then you need the chopper rotor, the 2 bearing holder pieces on each side of the rotor, the pan, the hinge plate at the front of the pan(that's fun trying to put those bolts in while laying on the seives, trust me),the stationary set of knives and all other equipment necessary. Its a good 2 day job to put a chopper in a beater-equipped machine. You might try the disrupter advertised on the "Attachments" column on this forum. Years ago, we sold 1680s with a chopper device called the "Straw Storm", which I believe was built by Gehl. Pretty much looked like somebody took a lawn mower deck, flipped it upside down and stuffed it into the back end of a combine. It was designed to have all the discharge material(straw and chaff) go into it and the 6 or 8 "lawn mower blades" would chop up and spread that stuff 30-40ft. looked like a good outfit except for it used horsepower and closed up the back end of combine. Don't know if these are still made or not. Hope this helps.