[GSBN] Baling from rounds
RT
archilogic at yahoo.ca
Sat Sep 28 19:10:05 UTC 2013
I don't think that there's any need to look for a different device for
making bales. A normal hay baler does the job quite well.
The problem to solve I think, is one of feeding the baler in a way that
isn't "awkward".
Instead of driving the baler over stationary windrows of straw, I think it
would be a matter of moving a continuous windrow of straw to a stationary
baler.
I'd suggest thinking of the big round bales as a roll of toilet paper
(which it is, for livestock) which you want to unroll from a stationary
dispenser and then feed the strip of unrolled straw into the pickup tines
of the square baler.
This would call for a short conveyor (ie a continuous strip of moving
"ground") between the round bale "dispenser" and a stationary square baler
- slat type or belt type, doesn't matter ... however a belt type conveyor
would allow you to split the end rollers at the baler end and tilt them
towards each other to form a "Vee"so that the conveyor belt naturally
wants to collect the wide strip of unrolled straw into a narrower heap
(like a windrow) before feeding into the square baler. Mills discard
room-width conveyor belts now and then and the people living near the
mills often scoop them up (free) to use as roofs or floors for
outbuildings and such.
This means that you want a passive roller set a foot or two away from the
other end of the conveyor so that one sets the round bale onto two rollers
at one end of the conveyor (the passive roller + the driven roller of the
conveyor) so that when the conveyor is set in motion (presumably belt
driven, connected to the same power source that is running the baler), the
round bale unrolls itself onto the conveyor belt and a steady stream of
straw is fed into the spinning pickup tines of the square baler.
Done and done.
That being said, presumably the end game of this whole process is to make
straw walls. Yes ?
Taking big round bales and unrolling them to make little pieces which are
then bunched together again to make a large wall panel seems a bit like
taking trees to make plywood and then cutting the plywood into skinny 1"x
4" strips which are then nailed together again to make a 4'x 8' sheet of
sheathing.
I think that it would make more sense to place a perimeter form of the
proposed wall on the ground (or floor slab) and make a simple
"toilet-paper-dispenser-like" rig that will suspend the round bale over
the wall form and which when moved back and forth over the length of the
wall form, dispenses layers of straw into the wall form where it can be
compacted, plastered and then tilted up into place when the plaster has
cured.
Ideally the round bale dispenser could ride on two rails (salvaged from
one of the many railroad tracks that are being torn up these days (when I
lived near Paris ON there was a salvage yard which had all manner of
railroad stuff - rails, plates, bridge timbers, box cars, deconstructed
stations etc) and the whole set-up would be portable.
On Sat, 28 Sep 2013 13:00:00 -0400, <gsbn-request at sustainablesources.com>
wrote:
> From: "Lance Kairl" <sabale at bigpond.com>
[snipped and pasted for brevity, excerpted from GSBN List Digest vol 29,
issue 19]
> ROLL OUT the round bale and then re bale in the standard baling method.
> That is move the small square baler over the windrow ( rolled out bale)
> similar to as it would be in the field.
> Yes you need a long straight piece of ground to do this, and if you are
> wanting to do it inside a shed in winter, then get a big shed
> From: Chris Magwood <chris at endeavourcentre.org>
>> I'm wondering if any of you have experience with making rectangular
>> bales out of round bales with a device other than the standard field
>> baler. I have done this using the regular baler, but it requires feeding
>> the straw into machine in an awkward way
--
=== * ===
Rob Tom AOD257
Kanata, Ontario, Canada
< A r c h i L o g i c at Y a h o o dot c a >
(manually winnow the chaff from my edress if you hit "reply")
More information about the GSBN
mailing list