G'day Pengs. Dunno if this will work as it applies to wheat that is really leaning over so that one half of the front always had the heads facing away from the centre and refused to feed in under or across that half of the front. We had terrible feeding problems with our old N7 in situations like this. [ This is from memory although the lifters are still in the scrap heap out on Rolf's farm ] Solution was modified crop lifters about 600 - 700mms long made of 10 mm rod mounted about 150 mms ahead of the point of the fingers on a piece of 15 or 20mm RHS which was held on by the finger mounting bolts. All lifters mounted on 9 " spacings. About 400 mms of rod was in front of the RHS mounting point. Definitely not ground engaging lifters. The critical part was for the rod from the rod's RHS mounting point down and forward. On both sides of the front's centre the rods were bent substantially out towards the outer end of the front on their respective sides so that the slope of the lifter rod was both down wards to pick the crop up and also sloped towards the centre of the front by an offset of about 150 mms. The very first 50 or 70 mms of the lifter rod was then straightened to be pointing directly into the direction of travel. This was to give the lifter good entry to the crop. The lifter rods first stood the stalks up to near vertical and then, due to the offset slope of the rod towards the centre, continued to tilt the stalks towards the centre as they slid up the slope of the lifter. As they were cutoff by the knife the stalks already had a good lean towards the centre and just fed straight into the auger and on into the elevator in a smooth flow. The top tail of the lifter rods were just left straight as usual but we did find that the last couple of inches of the top tail of the lifter rods should be curled down a little to allow the cut off, tilted over stalks and heads to flow and peel off the lifter rod when right near the auger. Hope you can understand the description. Beautiful, fast feeding in crops that were leaning over until nearly flat although perhaps a foot or more of the ground. And the N7 went like a cut cat in these sorts of crops when those lifters were installed. This might work on the frosted stuff as tipping the heads towards the centre both makes them feed into the auger direction and gets the cut off heads moving in the right direction Might work on stuff that still has some grain in it which our frosted stuff a couple of years ago did not have and was a real ******. Just lost most of our lentils around here as they only had about a fortnight to harvest and we have had about a week of completely unseasonal 38 to 40 degrees C. which has just cooked and destroyed the lentils. They look green but just shatter as you pick the plants up as they are just plain cooked with no moisture left. The very bad run down here over the last 12 years just seems to go on and on! 11.5 inches of rain for the year here [ average 16 inches ] so could you Americans send a little bit our way please! Cheers!
I do remember that we used it on linseed, and it made a huge diffrence to feeding. sort of trip over PVC pipe and heads go under table auger and no bunching just in fount of Auger. Try a five foot section and see how it performs! Rolf