How a Corn Planter Works

hey everybody it's brian just want to give you a quick overview of how our corn planter works let's start up at the top where the seed goes in so our planter is what you call a central fill we have these two centralized 50 bushel seed tanks john deere calls them ccs central commodity system so we can fill these with seed we can also fill the row units with seed those hold 1.6 bushel but generally we just use these central fill tanks so what happens here we pull our seed tender up which is an old gravity wagon that we have a conveyor on that gets up to here so it pumps the seed up and drops down in here we fill these up with corn or soybeans and then what happens is underneath me there's a big hydraulic blower fan and it pressurizes these tanks and pushes air through these tubes and there's a tube to each of the 24 rows and then each row gets filled with seed via the tube so once you've got a hopper full of seed you have a seed meter and that is rotating picking up seed and i have an extra meter here just in case we have a problem keep an extra one around so this is the two halves of it and that's what you see up there so you have a seed plate inside this is a corn plate 27 hole corn plate so each of these holes through this tube here which is this part you see here there is a fan on each side of the planter pulling a vacuum through these meters and that's what holds these seeds on here so this spins around and there's a mechanism on the other side as this spins against it that helps singulate the seed and make sure we have one seed on each hole and as it comes through here it drops and goes down the seed tube so we can get a good look at the seed tube in a minute actually rebuilding the planter for this season putting new disc openers on it and i've got all the rows done but one so let's look at it all together before we take one apart now we are no-till and there's all kinds of attachments you can put on planters but we'll keep it pretty basic here um for example we don't have any fertilizer on our planter there's all kinds of fertilizer attachments you can have up at the front of row say imagine the row is going this way this will be the front so direction of travel is this way this is a row cleaner we have cab adjustable floating row cleaners so these are going through these are moving trash or any dirt clods out of the way we want a really smooth path for the rest of the row unit now ours being cab adjustable they have a pneumatic cylinder here i have a little handle i can turn in the cab i can i can lift these all the way up if i don't want to use them at all i can have just a little up pressure on them so they just kind of barely tickle the ground i can let them free float and kind of do their own thing or as i usually do in no-till i got about 10 to 20 psi of down pressure and that keeps them down in the dirt clearing the path for what the gauge wheel so the gauge wheel engages our depth is its main job so we have a handle back here with a bunch of notches that is our depth adjustment how deep the seat is going to be so when this hits the ground the gauge wheel rides up to the correct depth and then you have your disc opener making a nice seed trench so you you want a clear path for these because you imagine if you have a bumpy ride that's going to be changing your your depth all the time so you won't be consistent then at the back you have a closing system we run one rubber wheel and one spike wheel on the other side to be a little more aggressive in some of the no-till and cover crops that we do you also have a downforce system on a planner ours happens to be a hydraulic downforce system there's all kinds you can have springs on these parallel arms that can provide down pressure the next step above that would be airbags and then we have had on our last two planners no airbags and gone to this hydraulic and the hydraulic reacts all the time just it's it's constantly sensing the ground through a way pin which is what this wire is connected to back here so each row can have its own set down force and change as the planner moves along for example if i'm going along a sprayer track those rows that are in that tire track they will show more downforce on my downforce map than the other rows because they're trying to maintain that depth in a harder spot another thing this will be our third year with this this is a little electric motor and that is what is turning that seed plate inside there so you kind of have three steps here you can have a ground driven planter or this one isn't but let's pretend where as you travel along this tire would be connected to a set of gears with a chain if you want to change your planting population you would change the size of the sprockets that the chain rides on so that has we could say that system has a lot of noise in it how how tight is your chain what condition is it in is your tire dragging or skipping or anything like that they do a fine job ground drive planner's been around forever though so next step above that would be hydraulic drive so we've had hydraulic drive in the past what there would be would be a hex shaft through here so like before i went to electric drive we would have a hex shaft that drove the left hand 12 rows and one that would drive the right hand 12 rows so i could run two populations at once if i had a pre-programmed population in the field as it came to those zones on the gps map one side might run a little less and one a little more the nice thing about these electric drives is there is an electric motor on every planter so now i essentially have especially with the downforce and the electric meters i essentially have 24 individual planters doing their own thing and that makes things very very precise here this is the housing for one of the fans that pulls vacuum through that is the air compressor for the row cleaner system with those pneumatic cylinders and when we go and add the electric meters we had to go and put on this hydraulically driven alternator because we just need a little more juice in the system so now let's go back and get a better look at that seed tube this is the last row i have to rebuild i still have it apart a little bit so take this gauge wheel off bolt is already out here we go so you got the double disc openers we'll take both of those off get the other side off so you can see the whole thing we said the seed drops out of the meter into this tube it falls through right here there is a sensor right here that counts the seeds so up in the cab i can see the population that i'm dropping and make sure that's where i want it to be so then your seed tube ends right here seed falls out you've made your seed trench with the disc openers seed drops right there this is a bracket that was already on the planter you can slide a seed firmer up in here so it it goes along down the bottom of the trance and kind of smooshes the seed into the soil that can also be running um fertilizer fungicide insecticide about anything you can think of through it that's safe to put in the seed furrow and the these days there are some different delivery systems um you could argue there is some impreciseness and you're dropping the seed from up here all the way to down here and hoping it just lands with a dead drop john deere has their brush belt system on their exact emerge planters and all this stuff on here is precision planting they also have kind of like a little cleated belt so actually when the seed drops off the meter it gets caught in that belt and is actually delivered by the belt all the way to this point here that's where you hear the term high speed planter that's what's letting you really get the high speed is you actually carrying the seed down to the soil instead of just dropping it although this still works very very well so since i'm rebuilding the planter you might as well watch that on the last row so fresh new openers get a nice sharp bevel on them and we do these every two years um we're probably not totally out of spec on the old ones but we can't make a whole third season so i would argue this disc right here is probably about the most important thing on the farm of course it works in conjunction with everything else on the planter but we get a plant one time these don't cost a heck of a lot i run them for two years that's like 40 cents an acre so that's that's pretty cheap to go through these every couple of years and make sure we're getting a very nice seed trench have a sharp edge to cut through things just make a nice furrow for the seed and since we're no-till we're not always perfect conditions all the time like a nice tilled seed bed so we want to keep this thing tuned up so there are spacers on the stub shaft that this sits on generally i don't have to change them when i put new ones on uh this time i did have to take a few off the other side to get them to set up right and i'll show you what that means here in a minute put this other side on [Music] the nut on and you do have left and right hand threads so this is normal righty tighty other side here is the lefty tidy but i kind of remember it whichever side you're on and the top of the nut goes forward to tighten top of the knot to the rear to loosen so now we need to set these up properly i think i need to adjust this yeah take my torque wrench here these go down to 90 foot-pounds i was set up for something else okay now we're set on 90. that's going the right way for this side get it click go double check it there we go flip the switch tighten this other side there we go both sides are tight now now the next thing to make sure you're making that good v-shaped seat trench a couple of business cards here so the easy way to do this is so these are these are wedged out that's what those spacers do and the way the row unit is built so they're only touching right here where they're making ground contact so take your business card slide into the stops come the other way slide until it stops that's perfect you should have a couple of inches right here that one's just right don't need to mess with the spacers pop my dust cap in next on the list is to put the mud scrapers back on and not smash my fingers so they're held together with the spring here hold spring tension on the disc opener it can be a little tricky hang the first one bring the second one over try to get it in one notch bring it around don't pinch myself because that would hurt let me get a screwdriver go in one of the two holes over here bend it out there we go scraper is on so you can imagine as this is going around if we get in some muddy conditions this is going to peel that mud off before it comes back around the final piece put the gauge wheel back on set the arm up here there we go that's on and this planter has a rebuild kit on it let me show you that another place you can put an attachment this hole here that's a john deere setup you can run a tube down here and apply some dry insecticide that way you'd have another hopper back here kind of like a seed box but it would have dry insecticide in it so this this rebuild kit these arms they get worn out over time get some slop in them so this rebuild kit puts a sleeve in here and you put a shaft on instead of the normal bolt that goes through and that takes all the slop out and you can use your old arm john deere has a new arm that's a better design i might try one of those sometimes but this kit works this is what came on this planner when we had it built for us by a precision dealer a couple years ago so what happens is you got all these washers in here i'm going to tighten this down by hand let me get my torque wrench again now we go back up to 150 pounds here on the torque wrench i just passed it okay 150 pounds and the way they made these kits these are all now righty-tighty no matter what side you're on so we'll torque this to 150. so that's going to squeeze this in a little bit shouldn't do it all the way all right kind of not camera's in the spot i want my wrench to be there we go this'll work get that click there we go that one went right so if you watch this nut should not have turned so now what do we do we get my crescent wrench here a couple of these i had to go back and and take apart and get right so a couple of these pivot shafts of the repair kit came loose so i need to re-torque those so what you do is you take a bolt with a nut and a washer and you back the nut off the head of the bolt so really you're going to tighten them together but the nut is going to be the only thing tight against the pivot shaft and you got to get your flats lined up here so you can tighten them with the same socket so torque wrench to 150 foot-pounds sockets covering them both lock tight on the pivot shaft get it to 150 there we go check it again so now the nut is tight but the bolt is not so two wrenches here you want to hold the bolt tight and then back the nut off myself a little more leverage here with two wrenches on the nut keep the bolt tight there we go so now the nut is backed off and we can take them off now that pivot shaft is torqued to 150 pounds and we can put the rest of the assembly back together as it should be so when i torque this bolt down that is putting pressure on this threaded part against the shaft in there that we installed so this nut should turn independent they shouldn't tighten or loosen together so what this big nut does is squeeze all these spring washers to put tension on the gauge wheels so it's pretty free right now it's rubbing against the disc a little it's probably about where it needs to be actually so we put this up tighten this nut by the instructions so the gauge wheel doesn't fall back down as it would when the planter is raised up so what you do is go to the nut and just back it off until it falls on its own maybe another turn here there perfect so that actually serves another function so if that tension in there these gauge wheels that have kind of a hump right here and a dip and then they have a lip on the outside that also serves as a way to wipe clean the disc openers so the instructions on this kit say you could probably actually do away if the mud scrapers if you set these right and keep them that way maybe adjust them about once a year but i already had the scrapers they're not hard to put on so i put them back on they're not hurting anything so now i just got to put that gauge wheel on the other side as well and set it up and this planter is all ready to go for 2021 planting so all rebuilt all my various tools i've used while i'm doing this 8360r tractor up there pulling everything of course we are in the shop so planter is folded up into transport mode right now and of course it unfolds to be 60 foot wide and you can see on the front we got weights on either end so these would be the ends when it's unfolded put the weights on there to take place of the weight we've lost when we removed the row markers now we haven't used row markers for a few years now and the style of these planners when they're folded up they tend to just like rattle themselves apart and we're hardly using them with gps so we just took them all thanks everybody for watching if you didn't know your way around a planter before maybe now you have a little better idea of how the thing works and i say corn planter that's a pretty common thing to say 24 rows 30 inch spacing you know that's generally a corn planter in in most parts of the world but it does other thing like i said if you change the seed plates we plant all our corn all our popcorn all our soybeans with this you could plant really wide grow wheat with this if if you really wanted to on our old planter when we had a different kind of meter uh the seed plate for popcorn was actually also a sunflower plate so you know you could plant sunflowers with this plant all kinds of things with this not just corn so now i think you'll have a pretty good idea of how a planter works we've kind of gone through the basics of it and hey before too long what's today march 12th uh maybe in five six weeks this thing will be out in the field putting some corn in the ground

Channel: The Farmer's Life

Views: 644

Rating: 5 out of 5

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Id: 71dWtnZyPHE

Length: 21min 14sec (1274 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 16 2021