Typically when you’re harvesting using a rotor combine you’d have to change concaves from crop to crop to get threshing capabilities for each crop while battling changing crop and weather conditions, which often lead to increased grain loss and dockage of your sample due to poor threshing abilities.
While all of the rotary combines on the market have gotten larger with more horsepower and capacity, it seems as though the concave sections and rotors haven’t changed at all.
This means that while you may have more HP and capacity with the larger machines you can’t use that capacity to harvest any faster or more efficiently on your farms.
The problem with the concave models that are currently on the market is that each of them utilize the same theory for threshing grain – to get a clean sample you have to speed up the rotor and close up the concave section to ensure all of the material is threshed. This also means that you have to change concaves based on the crop you’re harvesting to get a clean sample.
While changing concaves, speeding up the rotor and closing up the concave can clean up the grain sample, you’d have to decrease your ground speed to prevent grain from being lost out of the back of the machine by either rotor or sieve loss due to the lack of capacity utilizing the OEM concaves.
We all know that changing concave sections based on what is being harvested is a major inconvenience and complete time waster. If you’re growing multiple crops, you might have to change concaves 4-5 times per year, and sometimes twice a day as different sections of your farm might be ready to be harvested before others.
Copperhead Ag, out of South Dakota, along with Donnie Estes (original concave developer) manufacture a Concave System you never have to swap out. You’re able to make adjustments to your threshing capabilities utilizing the adjustable and removable Cover Plates. You simply make adjustments based on the crop you’re harvesting and the threshing quality of the grain sample.
Rotor loss happens when the grain can’t be unloaded into the concaves from the rotor area of the combine. Due to the spacing of the concaves it stays in the rotor section bypassing the concave section completely and coming out of the back of the machine.
Sieve loss happens as most of the concave options on the market today rely on wires that are spaced close together to ensure threshing capability. However, this means they need to unload the grain at the back of the concave section which overloads the separating grates and sieves and is lost out of the back of the machine instead of unloading into the tank of the combine.
Prior to the Copperhead Ag Concave, the only way to get a good sample of grain and not lose any out of the back, was to slow down ground speed which would help to not overload the rotor section or the separating section and sieves.
Copperhead’s patented notched bar, adjustable Cover Plates and increased spacing between their threshing bars you no longer have the same problem with loss or sample quality.
The Copperhead notched bar is designed to restrict the grain inside of the notch. This means that as more grain pours into the concave section the grain that has been restricted inside of the notch is what is used to thresh the grain coming in also known as grain on grain threshing.
When running the Copperhead Concave System it’s recommended that farmers use completely different settings than when using any other concave on the market.
Because you are restricting the grain inside of your notched bar you must slow down your rotor speed so that you’re not slamming the grain through the concave section causing damage to the grain.
By slowing down the rotor it allows you to be gentler on the crops as they move through the concave section which significantly reduces the amount of cracks and splits that are seen with the other concave models.
Another advantage of slowing down the rotor is that as the material is fed into the concave section you’re able to feed more evenly which reduces the amount of material that bypasses the concave section, thus significantly reducing rotor loss.
The Copperhead adjustable Cover Plates allow you to either keep the grain inside of the concave section when needing more threshing in small grains, as well as adjusting the capacity of the concaves based on what you’re seeing for yield in a field to field basis.
This means that the Copperhead Ag Concaves are fully adjustable allowing you to harvest every crop utilizing the same set of Concaves.
The progressive spacing between the Copperhead Concave bars is what allows you to harvest at faster ground speeds without worrying about overloading the separating grates and losing product out of the back. This spacing also means we’re unloading the rotor section much faster than all other concave systems on the market which is the final piece to eliminating rotor loss.
With the Copperhead Ag system all of the different pieces of the system work together in unison to allow you the ability to harvest faster and more efficiently while decreasing the amount of loss coming out of the back of your machines. For more information on the Copperhead Concave System Visit our Harvest Solutions Page or call us toll-free at 1-855-752-5525