Hit The Hay

The hay baler changed farming dramatically during the late 1800s and early 1900s. Until that time, hay was stored loose in the upper story of the barn where it took up considerable space. But by compressing the hay, or baling it, more hay could be stored in the same amount of space.

A baler harvests common hay crops such as Timothy Grass, alfalfa and clover, which are used as animal feed. These crops are cut with a mowing machine when they are about 18 in tall and still green. The mowing machine cuts and crimps the forage and discharges it into a 4 ft wide windrow. This crimping process breaks the stems and makes the hay more palatable to cattle. A hayrake turns the hay over so that the windrow can dry completely. The baler gathers the cut hay from the windrow and compresses it into square- or round-shaped bales for easy transportation and storage.¹

The first balers were powered by horses walking on an inclined treadmill. As the leather and wood treadmill belt moved with each step of the horse, it turned a shaft that operated a chain drive. The chain drive, through a variety of sprockets, drove a plunger into the baler, which compressed the hay. Hay was hauled to the baler from the field in wagons, and then forked into the bale chamber by hand. Wooden blocks were dropped into the chamber when the bale reached the right size. Wire or twine was then threaded around the bale and tied by hand.²

As technology improved, the steam traction engine replaced the horse, and the internal combustion tractor eventually replaced the steam engine. By the 1930s, balers were attached to tractors to automatically pick up hay from the ground.³

Abe Zimmerman?s New Holland Machine Company opened its Pennsylvania plant in 1895 as a one-man engine repair shop that carved its niche in the 20th century as an innovator of agricultural equipment. In 1940, New Holland introduced the ?Nolt? as the world?s first commercially successful automatic picking and self-tie square baler. This machine, invented by Ed Nolt, a farmer from New Holland, revolutionized haymaking and established the company as a leader in agricultural equipment.

What followed was a shift in direction from engines toward hay and forage equipment, with improved forage harvesters, rakes, and spreaders. Balers remain the major product of the New Holland plant, which built its 700,000th square baler last October. But it also fabricates parts for other plants in the company (now Case New Holland). In fact, this CNH facility is now the largest of its kind in the world, completing a $34 million expansion and renovation last year that included the installation of two new state-of-the-art paint systems and five additional product lines that were transferred from the closing of another plant.

Since balers are constructed primarily of structural and sheet steel, the plant uses 15 laser-cutting systems from Mazak Optonics Corporation (Schaumburg, IL) to process 10 ga, 12 ga and 3/16 in outer skins, covers and shields for the balers as well as large, 20 ga steel exterior panels for combines assembled at a sister plant in Grand Island, NE. It also makes smaller but heavier brackets and other frame parts from 3/8 in steel.

The lasers are configured into three four-machine cells and one three-machine cell. Each cell is automated by a Flexible Manufacturing System (FMS). FMS combines automated setup and valued-added process integration with multiple laser cutting machines and automated raw material loading and the subsequent unloading. Bob Unruh, a CNH manufacturing engineer, says he was first drawn to the Mazak lasers due to their automation, better cut, the capability of one operator to run four machines, and their smaller footprint. ?The footprint is a big deal because we have a pretty tight shop,? notes Unruh. ?The fabrication area is a 150 ft x 500 ft space.?

Four 4 kW Hyper Turbo-X laser cutting systems with 5 ft x 10 ft beds help CNH seamlessly add volume and improve the entire plant?s fabricating process (see Video 1). ?We?re really attacking the whole process of making parts,? explains Unruh. ?Cutting the steel is only 7 percent of the process. The rest involves getting the steel there, getting the parts and the scrap away, and programming. If you improve the cutting process by half, you?re only improving the process by 3.5 percent. If you attack the 93 percent and make a 10 percent improvement, you?re doing better.?

Each HTX laser is equipped with a 6-station automatic torch/tool changer (see Video 2), 10-station automatic nozzle changer (see Video 2), automatic nozzle inspection (see Video 3), NC programmable nozzle spatter removal system (see Video 4), automatic focal point position calibration, automatic lens calibration and Mazatrol PREview CNC.

The HTX lasers and FMS not only improve the cutting, but ?attack the other stuff,? says Unruh, who adds that these allow him ?more flexibility and versatility on the shop floor. Being able to run lower-volume work on the HTXs allows us to keep the higher-volume work on the other machines, and overall we?ll probably be able to react faster. Right now we run lighter-gauge material on one cell and heavier material on another. The HTXs give us the ability to run thin, 20 ga parts and then a 3/8 in part back-to-back with minimal changeover (see Video 5,6,7)."

When an HTX is presented with a different material thickness than it ran previously, the pre-programmed control tells the machine to change nozzles and all the necessary machine settings automatically. The CNC drives the laser through a 64-bit processor using look-ahead capability to automatically calculate cutting speed and acceleration for every programmed contour, predicting the optimum speed and power to reach the next cutting shape. This next-generation control makes it possible to achieve ultra high speed with ultra-precision cutting and greatly reduce heat build up.

"With other machines, you?d have to manually change things or put it on a different machine that?s already set up,? states Unruh, who expects to put more work on these lasers. ?We still have a fair amount of work that we do the old way, where we shear a blank and then punch holes into it. We haven?t been able to move all of that work over to lasers because we haven?t had the capacity. So we?re going to take as much of that as we can and put it on the lasers.?

In other words, just as the hay baler changed farming dramatically during a time long ago, these laser systems are changing the way hay balers are manufactured now.

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1 Douglas E. Betts, ?How Products Are Made?, from Brian Bell, Farm Machinery, 3rd ed. Diamond Farm Book Publishers, 1989.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

Mazak Optonics Corporation, 2725 Galvin Court, Elgin, IL 60124, 847-252-4522, www.mazakoptonics.com

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