Haying problems

These days in my old age I don't do much hay anymore and my equipment is on the old side. I start my season every year with my smallest field, just two acres and nearby. I was planning to bale most of it yesterday, (the heaviest part gets a lot of shade), so mid morning I got the baler out to service and test it as usual. It tied one bale, then the twine was stuck on the bill hooks. Investigating, I found I had no twine! Zero! and the cut ends had pulled a few scrap pieces into the knotters. I remembered then that last year when I was done I had "loaned" my twine to someone, but I couldn't remember who. I checked the nearest source in town and they had what I have been using, 9000 poly. I also checked with a friend nearby. He had 9600 poly and it would save me the trip to town. I picked it up, threaded the baler and started feeding hay into it. IT WOULD NOT TIE. Both knotters had three different problems that I could identify, and I knew from memory the adjustment for each of them. I jumped in my roadster and drove to town and got a bundle of 9000 poly, tied it to the cut-off 9600, and it went back to tying every knot perfectly.

Right. I covered this yesterday. You can
adjust your knotters to accept most any
twine. But if you have them adjusted for
one, you must always use that.

I always found as the baler got older, the thicker twine
worked best. My brother always kinda cheap guy,
wanted the best value and would buy 10,000, I only
used 9,000. He was baling hay and was having trouble
with bales not tying consistently. He ran out of twine
and came to see if I had any extra on hand, I only had
9,000. He took it reluctantly. Few days later he
brought me back a new package of 9,000 twine and
he had 2 packages of 10,000 in his truck also. I asked
him how his baler worked with the 9,000 twine.
Perfect he said, I think the hay was dryer and the
bales stayed together better. Strangely enough once
he went back to his 10,000 , the hay must have gotten
damp and tough again , because his baler started
missing bales. I never could convince him.

I ran into a situation one time. I needed
some twine for a baler that I had never
used before. Was kind of experimenting and
trying to get the thing to work. I didn't
have any twine for it at all. What was in
it was all ruined from mice and rats when I
started working on it. So I went to buy
twine. Kind of heard that I needed to get
9000 for it. But the place that I went to,
didn't have any 9000, and didn't carry it
any more. Figured I'd run into the same
problem if I went elsewhere. So I just got
some twine that they did have on hand (not
9000). Anyways, I never could get the baler
to work with it. I played around with it,
but it just clearly wasn't going to work
with the wrong twine. Found some 9000
elsewhere, and I got it going after I did.

Made a believer out of me. The baler wasn't
the best. But anymore problems that I had
after that, wasn't twine problems.

(quoted from post at 05:55:34 06/01/23) Right. I covered this yesterday. You can
adjust your knotters to accept most any
twine. But if you have them adjusted for
one, you must always use that.

Click to expand...

I was using different twine due to a unique situation, and a trip to town takes time. Given the time I could have made the adjustments. As I posted originally I could ID three specific problems and I knew without looking them up the adjustments for each problem. However, I didn't have the time that day.