New Holland Rollabar Rake - Speed vs Quality

Bill VA

Well-known Member
Those of you with a NH rollabar rake, how fast can you take and get a good gleaning of the hay into a windrow?

Ground driven, so unless the wheels are slipping, I assume the tines are cycling the same distance per rotation regardless of speed.

I'm thinking faster ground speed ought to get you a fluffier windrow???

Just curious.

Thanks!
Bill
 
now ...dont go wide open in road gear ! LOL,. if you want a fluffier windrow raise the front adjustment up as hi as possible , and adjust the rear down ,, in all honesty new holland makes a very good rake ,.. BUT if you want any bar rake to last , AND , if you want your rake to last ,dont go faster than 8-12 mph ,. those bars are really swinging back there and i have seen a lot of new idea ,, rip out the pockets and the bars ,. and as soon as you here a tooth doing clikity - clik,.. stop and take a bar and straten it or remove it..
 
With a 256 rake it's 4 gear on the 4020 in grass and 3ed in alfalfa,unless dad was not around!
 
I use 2nd gear,sometimes half throttle 3rd on a Farmall H. Any faster it would probably fly apart.But then,some of our fields are pretty rough.
 
I use a IH 5 bar rake and I pull it with a Case VAC and run 3rd gear 3/4 throttle. I like big fluffy windrows
 


Depends on the hay. You go too fast on heavy wet hay you end up breaking things and throwing some hay out of the windrow.

Moderation in all things!
 
And I did not like fluffy windrows, wanted them nice and tight. Fluffy would not feed corectly. Uncle that we baled for had them.
 
Going too fast with a bar rake is going to wear out the rake faster. Wanting fluffy windows is more of a crop thing and some rake settings. Truthfully a bar rake is not the thing to make fluffy windrows with. Switch to a rotary rake if you really want fluffy windrows.

IF you want high rake speeds then go to a hydraulic driven rake. I have a JD 672 bar rake that is hydraulic drive and it works well. NH offered it too. The trouble I had with a ground driven bar rake is going faster made the rake run too fast. So with the hydraulic drive and can vary the travel speed and not have the rake go too fast or too slow.
 
Fluffy in my area means the hay dries faster and when it is as humid as it is most of the time here in Missouri we need fluffy to dry like it should
 
We used to drag our 56 at 6-8 mph. It stays together fine. It still makes a rope... I haven't used it in I think 12 years since we got the rotary.

Rod
 
smooth fields make for faster raking. to get fluffy windrows make sure the basket pitch adjustment is all the way up .that is the handle just above the latch that puts the basket in gear. JD B and oliver 77 can be run in 4th or 5th gear depending on how smooth the fields are farmall M 4th gear because thy are slow.
 
Make pretty good time with mine, too fast and tend to bend tines, so I find going fast I lose that time and more fixin' stuff. You can adjust for "fluffy" by changing the tilt of the rake. Waiting for a new belt to be delivered sure slows you down though!
 
I rigged up an offset hitch on the yard truck so I could pull the rake around with it.

Yes you can go faster but after you have repaired or replaced 3 or 4 bars you soon realize slow and steady wins the race.

Putting the truck in low range to keep the speed down worked alright and the air conditioned comfortable truck was a bonus.

Do not attempt to pull one behind a truck on the centered hitch location, you will wrap material so tight around the driveshaft it will catch on fire (not fun)
 
Bill, believe the book calls for a reel speed of 100 rpms. I run my 256 on my 1365 Oliver in 6th gear about 1500 rpms. Same rake for almost 30 years. Still looks good and works like a new one.
 
Massey 165 with multi power
1st, high range, MP on, throttle not cranked too hard.
Or
2nd high, idled back.

With the roll bars there seems to be a point where it throws hay out of a windrow.

When we went from a single to a double (2 left hand rakes) too much speed led to inconsistent and sloppy windrows.

Now that we have made a V-style rolabar (258 and a 260) we can carry more speed and it makes a much neater windrow.

In fabricating that hitch, what started out as "experimental" was absolutely perfect distance/offset/gap. Don't think I could do it again if I tried.
 


"high range 1st" seems to work best, approx 5 MPH.

I've tried "high 2nd" at part throttle, 6 MPH and that is about the max.
 
(quoted from post at 13:12:55 09/18/17)

My family did 30,000 to 40,000 small squares a year. When I was ten, I wasn't old enough to use the haybine; but I was old enough to rake.

We used a single rake until I was about 13.... so I have hours and hours....and hours with NH 256 Rollabar in a single hitch.

When we got two of them, I practically kissed the ground. I was getting mighty sick of spending my entire summer raking.

Anyway. We raked with a John Deere 1520 and sometimes a Farmall 706.

On good flat fields, we would rake in 2nd gear of high range with either tractor.

As far as the tightness of the windrow goes, speed isn't the ONLY factor.

I can rake you a fluffy windrow at low speed. I can rake you a tight windrow at high speed (within reason).

One of the biggest factors determining fluffy vs tight is how you position the rake on the swath. If you position the rake far to the right (as you look forward from the tractor seat); then the rake won't turn over the entire swath. It will take most of the swath and roll it tightly onto the left side of the swath.

In contrast, if you position the rake as far to the left as you can...so that it is just barely catching the right side of the swath; it will turn over the whole swath and when it spits out the delivery side of the rake, the windrow will sort of flop open all nice and fluffy.

But...beware...the fluffy windrow might not get you the best drying.

When you rake hay that hasn't been tedded, you can look back at the windrow and see where the "bottom hay" that needs drying is, by looking for green.

Generally, in that situation, positioning the rake far to the right makes a tight windrow, but the windrow ends up with the green stuff on top, ready to air out and dry.

In that situation, positioning the hay far to the left "over-rakes" the swath. So you get a fluffy windrow, but the green stuff gets flopped back over to the bottom where it won't dry out.


If you tedd your hay first, that doesn't matter.


In reality...if you tedd your hay, you aren't drying it in the windrow anyway. All the windrow does is pile it up nice and neat for the baler.

So...for years and years when I was raking, we tedded the hay to dry and then tried to rake nice tight windrows to feed the baler easily.

...This is my doctoral raking thesis from somebody that has spent WAY too much time on the rake.

Next time, we'll discuss the pros and cons of raking double windrows by raking over twice vs. raking one windrow against the other...
 

Please don't tell my father or my older brother...but on really big fields, with that single hitch...when nobody was around...

I would use third gear in high range, especially if I wanted to get home to get a drink of water and some supper.
 

My brother currently runs beef on Dad's farm. He still puts up between 30,000 to 40,000 small squares per year.

He only uses the tedder on early June hay and 2nd cutting.

Unless it gets rained on, any first cut that he does after about July 1st (which is usually about 2/3 of his first cut) never sees the tedder.

It dries in the swath and he rakes it with the same two New Holland rollabars that were there when I went to college thirty years ago.

I tend to do the same thing on my little farm. We did 4,000 small squares this year. (So far...about 500 to go). I only tedd when it needs it.

I know that cow's aren't so badly affected by dust/mold as horses; but we still have enough perfectly dry hay to take in our neighbor's horses and ponies for the winter.

Meanwhile, I watched our neighbor cut a field of first cutting at the end of August and tedd it twice over the course of three perfect days of drying, before raking and baling. It was old to begin with. I think that, by the time he beat the snot out of it twice with the tedder, it would be better hay for spinning fiber into thread than for any kind of feed.

It seems that he must just have a lot of time and fuel that he needs to use up.
 
Thanks everyone. Cut raked and baled some hay this past week/weekend and picked up the ground speed a bit on the NH56 rake. It did a terrific job gleaning the hay into fluffy windrows. No pics, but working on editing videos of the whole cutting, from start to finish. These will be long play videos I'll post to our YouTube channel and to here. You'll need popcorn...🙂😎👍

Bill
 
Always a rake-tedder since before I was born. In late 40's Grandpa traded a wore out he thought New idea 3 bar for a Deere 4 bar rake only, one perhaps second year had a wet year and could not get wet hay dried so it was traded in on a 4 bar New Idea rake-tedder and we used that untill we quit making hay in 1981. So probably from about 35 for first New Idea unit untill 81 only without a tedder for 1-1/2 years. I could not make hay here without a tedder.
 

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