What are the holes in the wiper panel of our Chainless bale feeders?

Published 1st December 2020
 

Hustler Consultant, Angus Hewetson, answers a commonly asked question; What are the holes in the wiper panel of our Chainless bale feeders? Over Hustler’s 3 years of development, Hustler tested 86 different versions to come up with this wiper panel design. The wiper panel’s role is to clean the hay off the rotor teeth when feeding without the hay binding and the holes in the wiper panel (larger gaps) help relieve the hay off the teeth so there is no jamming.

See more of our Chainless bale feeders here  &  here

 

Transcript

Hello, we often get asked, what is this hole in the bottom of our wiper panel on our Chainless machines? Now, why we have that there, is we tested, 86 different versions of wiper panels over a period of three years. We started off with having just a narrow gap that was tightly around the around the rotor spike and it used to stop just where the end happened and what we found, is that hay got dragged under there and got stuck and was always hanging off the side.It even jammed the rotors up. So, what we found over that period of time, we tried 86 versions, some of them were just a shield on one side, some of them with no stopper in the bottom here and we found that it was always going to take some hay with it and so we put this open patch in the bottom and then we put this round bar on the bottom here so the hay could fall off easily. We found that if it had a sharp edge, it would tend to just couple over the top and sit there. This rounded edge lets it fall off, we put these fins on because without them it didn’t push the hay off the tines as much. We tried putting the wiper out here and that didn’t work as well either. So after that three-year period and 86 different trials, we found that this was the best design.