How Much is Maintenance Costing You Each Year?

You know that when feeding cattle in the middle of a tough winter in rough conditions the last thing you want to worry about is maintenance, let alone the downtime it causes and the pressure you’re under to get your cattle fed. There’s many factors that need to be considered… 

These are some of the key factors that need to be considered when investing in feedout equipment of any kind, and they’re often overlooked at time of purchase:

1. Wearing/moving parts – Wearing or moving parts can be often identified by a machine that is noisy in operation – the more noise, the more wearing parts the machine has. Wearing parts means downtime and the machines performance degrades as the parts are worn. Not to mention the cost of replacing those wearing parts. Some of our Customers who’ve converted to the silent Chainless feeding system have reported saving a $2,000 maintenance bill in just one year compared to their previous feeder. 
2. Bushes – Drivelines that utilise bushes require frequent greasing, often as much as once per day in the height of the season. The last thing you want to worry about it greasing bushes in those tough winter conditions, that’s why the shafts on Hustler’s bale unrollers run on sealed bearings that retain enough grease for a whole weeks work. Not to mention the all the grease you’ll save day-in and day-out. 
3. PTO Drive – Aside from the safety issues with powering a bale processor with a PTO shaft the gearboxes require frequent servicing, and when excessive loads are induced from foreign objects in a bale you can be faced with an expensive repair bill, and the downtime to have your machine repaired. Hustler feeders are hydraulically powered for added safety and to eliminate any damage should your machine encounter such obstacles, but more importantly so your cattle can be fed no matter what.
4. Feed chains – The most troublesome part of a conventional bale processor, the feed chains in the bale chamber can skip a tooth on the drive sprockets when under an uneven load, or even derail from the drives causing the bale to jamb or drives not being able to turn the bale. This can stop your feeding program in its track, and worse, it’s not much fun wrenching chains back onto their sprockets in the freezing winter conditions. That’s why we’ve developed our Chainless feeders, with just two low speed rotors that tease apart bales in a 3:1 ratio to ensure it’s palatable for cattle without unnecessary maintaining. 

The heart of the Chainless X5000 – The world’s lowest maintenance bale feeding system.