NEW HOLLAND balers from the 1960's: how they work, maintenance, operation, and making good bales

[Applause] hello and welcome to pete's garage today i'm going to go in depth on my new holland 269 hayliner square baler new holland made a lot of balers through the 60s and frankly i can't keep all the numbers straight but they all shared a lot of the same mechanical components i've been through this baler not from the ground up but i've replaced almost every bearing in it and all the wear parts that needed replacing and it's got a nice new coat of paint on it and a new set of decals so in this video i'm going to go through how the the baler operates how each of its components work how the drive train works how fast it bales when it was made its mechanical specs pretty much soup to nuts so stay tuned the new holland 269 hayliner was made between 1964 and 68. this one was one of the first farm purchases that we made when we started farming in 2013 i paid 1200 at a consignment auction for it and they seem pretty common around here although i don't know how many total were made i've seen probably 10 at auction since i bought this one this baler makes 14 inches high by 16 inches wide bales and the bale length is adjustable and i'll get to that in a few minutes this baler runs off of a 540 rpm pto shaft and the plunger operates at around 65 strokes per minute strokes per minute is what determines how much capacity a square baler has so for comparison a high capacity modern baler operates at around 95 strokes per minute which means you can feed that baler a lot faster with hay and he'll kick out bales faster although hang experts will disagree with me an optimum bale is usually around 15 strokes or flakes in the bale so that means that this baler will put out about four bales per minute in comparison to a modern baler which can put out six or more bales in a minute i've got this baler hooked behind my international 656 tractor now it's about 65 horsepower but i've run this bale and it runs just fine behind a 20 horsepower tractor that's one of the great things about old machinery no excessive horsepower required i ran it with my farm all h for years and the pair did just fine now for the meat of this video which is exactly how this baler works because i think it is so cool i'm going to go through the baler from the pto input all the way to it spitting a bail out the back and show you how each step happens i think this stuff is cool to the farmer the mechanic and the layman alike because the technology still holds through to modern balers they work in mostly the same way the tongue on this baler swings and you can see the pinhole this is road transport position the tongue swings in so that the baler tracks behind the tractor now originally there was a rope that ran up the tractor i just have a wire here and what happens and this is pretty cool when you pull on the rope it disengages the pin here but this lever goes down into the tongue and it's connected to a steel cable which runs straight back around a pulley and then over to the right tire and there's a pin that goes into the right tire hub into a series of holes that are in the hub and lock that right tire in position when you've pulled the rope back so with that tire locked you drive the tractor ahead and the baler swings around in the field position where the pickup head is riding on the right side of the tractor feeding the windrow in up front power comes into the baler via this pto shaft and it comes into this big heavy flywheel and this big heavy flywheel is what gives the baler momentum as the plunger packs hay in front of the flywheel we've got two things we've got a dry disc slip clutch so if the baler gets overloaded this clutch will slip and you've got an over running clutch which is a set of pins that ride against a sawtooth wheel and if the baler is running faster than the pto those pins skip out of the wheel and make a click click sound these balers came with two pto shaft options and that was the difference between say a 269 and a 268 some of them only had two pto joints on the driveline so there was one here and one at the tractor this one's got three one at the flywheel one in the middle and one at the tractor and the effect of this is that you can turn the baler tighter with less stress on the u-joints than you do with one with fewer u-joints in addition to the slip clutch here there's also a shear bolt that connects the pto drive line to the flywheel here so if the baler gets overloaded the clutch can slip or the bolt can break coming back from the flywheel the flywheels directly connected to a hypoid gearbox here and what the hypoid does is it changes the direction of rotation from being in line with the tractor to being this way and it directly powers the plunger and on the other side of the gearbox it drives the chain and the belt chain drives the knotters and the belt drives the pickup so all the power comes out of this one gearbox here from the gearbox up front you've got a belt driven off the side of it which comes to this pulley here and this is the pickup drive pulley this pulley is connected to a shaft that goes all the way through the baler to the other side to run the sprockets and chain that power the pickup so this is the right wheel and this is where that shaft ends and there's a sprocket and a chain drive here the chain drive runs around in here and powers the rotating pickup head this pickup is adjustable it's in the up road position now to put it down all you do is undo the clip pick it up a little bit and let it down there is a spring on the other side which gives the pickup head some counterweight so that it floats instead of riding down on the ground with its full weight this is the pickup head so these teeth come around around pick up the hay and they're on a cam wheel on the end so the teeth change position as they're rotating around so when they come up here pretty soon after this position they'll dive down and go back under in the retracted position come out to pick up hay this keeps the hay down so it starts to pack the hay down a little bit and once it gets through the pickup there's a set of teeth that are on a trolley that go back and forth and they bring the hay from the pickup and pack it into the bale chamber there's an access door here in the back side of the baler you open it up and this is the carriage that holds the feeder teeth these are the feeder teeth they're spring loaded so that when they're pushing hay that way they're down and then when they come back they ride up on the hay so they push in one direction this whole carriage is mounted on these two tracks so it slides along these two tracks they curve up when they get to the bale chamber and that way the pushing teeth release the hay when they get to the bale chamber and then they come back although many things on this baler work just about the same as today's balers new holland seemed to be tinkering with the feeder teeth design at the same time almost because balers that were made from a similar period as this have different designs for feeder teeth some have they rotate on gears and come up and down with the rotation and kind of feed the teeth in this way so i don't think new holland was ever completely happy with the feeder teeth design and other manufacturers like international and john deere used augers here to push the hay instead of feeder teeth and they had their own claims about how much better they were because they pushed the hay in continuously but this has always worked well for me one major thing new holland advertised about this balers being cut above the rest is that there was no chance of the feeder teeth coming out of time with the plunger so you always want the plunger to be on its forward stroke when the feeder teeth are all the way back here you don't want them coming together at the same time or the feeder teeth are going to get ripped off the baler and older balers used a chain or a belt sometimes to power these feeder teeth and it would come out of time if something slipped instead this baler's got a solid arm that drives the feeder teeth and it comes right off of the plunger so that the two stay in time all the time no chance of them coming out of time the sequence for this baler is after the hay comes in on the pickup the feeder teeth slide and deliver it to the bale chamber after they've delivered a load to the bale chamber the plunger comes up and packs that hay into the bale now on the side of the plunger is a knife and that mates with a knife on the body of the baler so the two cut the hay that's piled on the side of the bale chamber making cut hay on the end of the bale and forming the bale it's really hard to see the knife because there's so much stuff in the way but here is the knife on the plunger i can't even get my hand in there here's the knife on the plunger and then the mating knife on the baler is right here and so the plunger slides right past that knife what we call the bail chamber is not really a chamber because it's only got four sides of the chute and then the plunger which comes in and makes the fifth side of the chamber it doesn't have a sixth metal side when this is packed full of hay the six side of the chamber is actually the hay that's come before it that's packed in so as that plunger comes forward it packs hay into the chute against the already packed bales which would be coming out through this chute so it packs them against that bale what keeps the bale in place on the plunger's retraction stroke that is when the plunger is all the way back and the hay's just sitting there what keeps it packed in is there's hay dogs on the top and the bottom of the chute which trip upward after the hay is packed and hold that hay in place they're just teeth that come up and hold it the other thing that keeps the hay packed in place are the hay wedges which are in either side of the bale chute here where the bale is forming in this area and they keep the hay from going backwards because they're shaped like this they're shaped like this with a sawtooth so you can add or subtract hay wedges down the chute depending on how tightly you pack the bales and how you want them formed the main mechanism though for controlling how tightly the bail is packed is this right here and it's down because there's no hay in it but this pinches against the hay as it rides through the chute and makes it harder for the hay to move through which in turn makes the plunger pack the hay more tightly as it's hitting the already formed bales in the chute and you just adjust this on both sides through these threaded rods and it moves this up and down the length of each bale is kept track of by this star wheel so as the haze moving through here this star wheel turns because it's got teeth riding in the hay in the bottom and see this arm over here is going up now when the star wheel hits that trip it trips the knotters to start working the bale length is adjustable by just moving this collar up and down so that when this resets it'll reset down to wherever you want the bale length so if you want a shorter bale you would move this collar down here so that the star wheel has less travel before it trips all right now let's talk about the knotters because they're the most confounding thing on these balers i found that they're pretty simple when you break them down although them being out of adjustment can cause a myriad of problems having an owner's manual helps a lot because you can diagnose them there's a whole chart in the owner's manual that tells you if the knotters are doing this or that try adjusting this or that but they can be very confusing the first thing to do in explaining the knowledge is to explain how the twine works this is a twine box on the bale and twine comes in balls it doesn't come in rolls it comes in balls and it's got space for four balls in here which would be two balls per side you hook the balls together on each side so that when one ball runs out it feeds into the other ball the twine comes up from the balls feeds through these holes and then winds up going through these two holes one hole for each side of the bale and then through this tensioning device which keeps the twine tight as it's moving through the baler then from the twine box and through the tensioning device the twine runs under here to a set of insulators that are on the back side of the needle carriage the twine runs through those insulators and through this insulator and back through a hole in the needle in the end of the needle and acts just like a sewing needle so when the knot is tripping the needles come up they carry that twine up to come to the knotters here i've hand rotated the baler so that the needles are halfway up into the baling chamber and you can see what happens the plunger moves rearward of the needles and the needles rise up in recesses in the plunger so that they're carrying the twine up into empty space and then they come up carrying the twine to the knotters where the knotters grab the twine and do their thing here i've hand rotated the baler to bring the needles into their uppermost position they've come out of the baler up out of the knotters and they're sitting here above the knotter here so what we have when this has twine in it is we've got twine running through a hole in the top there's twine running along the bottom and there's twine running along the top the twine running along the bottom has already been wrapped around the bale that came before it and a knife here cuts that twine and forms it into a knot to complete that bale the other end of that cut twine gets caught in the knot or there's a friction plate where it gets caught in there and starts to form the end of the next bale that's going to come after that's cut these needles come back down carrying the twine with it and they start wrapping around the next bale i know it's complicated but this is the best way that i can figure out to explain it so after all this nodding business and being pushed through the chute eventually the bales come to the thrower now this is a thrower it's not to be confused with a kicker a kicker is a pan that sits back here that the bale lands on after it comes out of the shoe and the kicker is spring loaded so that pan springs the bale up and into the wagon new holland actually developed the pan kicker but they elected not to use it because they thought it was too dangerous imagine if somebody was standing on it when it tripped anyway this is a belt thrower it actually catches the bales between two belts that are rotating and throws them out the back this bale thrower is a later model than what originally would have come with this baler this is a model 70 bale thrower originally the bale thrower for this model would have been a 53a which has uh more difficulty in adjusting the model 53a would track with the wagon through a linkage that went on to the front of the wagon to turn the chute one way or the other and it had a trip mechanism with a rope to adjust how fast the thrower was throwing the bales a lot more complicated to work this originally had a 53a on it when i bought it i took the 53a off i sold it and i bought this model 70 and put it on the baler the baler and the thrower are completely separate pieces of equipment you can take the thrower off and just use the baler to load wagons or drop bales on the ground here's how the bale thrower works you have the main flywheel on the front of the baler it is driven by a belt that runs on the main flywheel up to this pulley here there's an idler pulley here and the way you adjust how far the bales are being thrown is through the speed that the belts are rotating in back the big wide belts and the way you adjust their speed is there's a crank handle that goes up to the tractor here and what that crank handle does is it adjusts the position of the idler pulley putting more tension on the belt as it moves inward this pulley here is a special kind of pulley with two shifts that move apart and together depending on the belt tension so when those two shivs are together the belt is riding on the outside of the pulley thus making the shaft that goes back to the thrower rotate more slowly when you put more tension on the belt those two shifts move apart and the belt slides in so there's a smaller diameter pulley that the belt is riding on and it makes the shaft rotate faster pretty clever i think now from this front drive pulley here there is a long shaft that's supported by intermediate bearings that comes all the way back to this pulley here this pulley has a belt on it which goes around a right angle which is pretty funky drives this pulley which in turn drives this pulley which drives this flywheel which helps give the bale thrower its own momentum and from the flywheel the top and bottom belts are driven via these pulleys this is spring loaded so that as the bale starts to load into here the belts grab it and they're tapered so that as the bale comes through it does this and shoots the bale out the back you can point this from side to side say you're going around a turn and you want to shoot the bale into the wagon but the wagon is not straight behind the baler via this hydraulic cylinder which tilts it either way the mechanical history of me and this baler is quite a long story as i said i bought it in 2013 and it ran all right when i bought it the first year i think we made 300 bales with it and then at the end of the first year i had a custom bailing job for a neighbor which actually paid for the 1200 dollar cost of the baler that i spent when i bought it i took the thrower off the baler had one on when i bought it and sold it the first year which i regretted a whole lot later on we ran it for a couple years and it started to develop some bangs and knocks and so the beginning of probably the third year we were up to making i don't know a thousand bales i decided that i would get a junk baler with a thrower on it and put the thrower on this baler and use the junk baler for spare parts so i found one and getting it as quite a story in itself involving some locals who had a lot of junk but eventually i got it back to the farm i took the thrower off me and my dad put the new thrower on and then over the next two years well no let me back up that same year that i bought the baler and the thrower i went through this baler and replaced all the bearings on the plunger and some of the drive bearings on the pickup head because the plunger was so loose the bearings were shot that was banging actually when it made a stroke and i also sharpened the knives on the plunger and on the baler body they had hit a lot of rocks they were pretty dull probably never been sharpened over the years so i had in essence of smooth running baler but i had this thrower that i'd bought off a junker baler that had been sitting outside for who knows how long and the bearings and the throwers started going one by one and i started by just replacing one of them at a time and the bearings and the belts that on the rollers on the end of the wide belts on the thrower are quite a bear to to get out and replace because you've basically got to take the whole thrower apart and to get at the bearing so after replacing a couple of them i said well shoot i'm just going to go through and replace all of them and i did that and after that the throwers worked great now the year after i did that we did 3 500 bales and it's just my wife and i and i'm throwing bales into four kicker wagons that we got and we're having to come up and unload them in the barn then i'm going back out and bailing well my wife and i are you know my wife's going to turn 50. i'm 52 and we decided this really isn't the way so i had this baler that i'd painted replaced the bearings and did all this work sort of knew mechanically at this point and i decided to go out and buy a round baler so now this baler sits as a backup for the round baler which i've never had any problems with the round baler's function perfectly since i bought it and it sits in the barn now i don't want to sell it because it's good to have a backup for all of our hang equipment and i may wind up making bedding bales with it at some point in the future but i'm pretty proud of it because i put all this work into it and it's not something i would ever sell it's like the old tractors i redo the the last part of this video is some tricks that i've learned to help these old balers run well because when they're not running well it's a real pain in the butt especially on baling day when you're trying to get things done and you've got to screw around with the the knotters most of the time and the first tip has to do with the knotters make sure that you always grease every point in the knotter before you go out and bale and there's a ton of grease fittings here an owner's manual helps tell you where they all are and blow the knotters off with compressed air get all the chaff and crap out of them blow back around in here around underneath the hay dog where it can accumulate and keep the hay dog from working all this blow all this out and sometimes if i'm bailing for a long day say i was doing more than 500 bales in a day i would come in after i'd bailed 500 and grease and blow off the knotters it's amazing what a difference it makes it can turn marginally function knotters into knotters that hardly ever miss the next tip is to make sure that these hay wedges that are inside the bale chute are not rotted off they're the first thing to rot out on the chute especially if hayes been left in it over the winter it'll just rot them right off so you want to make sure you have the same number on every side sometimes you can get into funky situations having to do with the intricacies of how the the bale chambers being loaded where you might want to run another one on one side than the other but my opinion is you adjust the feeder knives to evenly load the bale chamber you put the same number of hay wedges on each side and you want to make sure that they're in good working order and not corroded out make sure that the hay dogs are working that the ends aren't busted off the hay dogs that the springs on the hay dogs aren't stretched out or busted because you won't get properly shaped bales you'll get banana bales and odd looking bales out of a baler that doesn't have the correct bale tensioning devices working inside the chamber in the chute next tip take proper care of the baler at the end of the season i see so many impalers where they don't bother to clean the hay out it takes like 10 minutes to clean all the hay out of the thing at the end of the season if that hay sits in the chute i don't care whether the baler is inside or outside you're going to have more corrosion if it sits outside it's terrible because the hay's going to soak up the rain and the snow water and you're going to wind up with all kinds of problems clean the baler out at the end of the season i pour a little mo used motor oil over the knotters just to make sure that the shiny parts in the knotter don't get rusted up over the winter yes you're still going to get some rust in the bale chute but that'll clean out the first time you bail the next year and if you're able store the baler in a barn do not leave it out in the rain during the winter time if you don't have a barn big enough to put the baler in what i did is i used to take a couple pieces of scrap sheet metal like barn roofing lay them over the top of the bale put a tarp over the top of them tie that tarp under the baler so that at least you're protecting the knotters i always ran them to protect the knotters and the bale shoe so that no water gets in there next tip and i may not have the best answer for this this is the best one that i've come up with the best method when you're hooking your balls of twine together in the storage area here you wind up with a knot and you make the knot like this this is just the way the knotter makes the knot in the baler so you've tied them together like this now what i've found is that you're most likely to miss knots on bales when this runs through the whole twine feeding assembly before it gets to the knotters and it would inevitably miss a few bales as it was changing over balls of twine what i found to help with this is to cut off as much of this as i'm comfortable with without losing it's knotting capability and then to take the knot and roll it in your hands like this so that you get that twine right along the side and i would do this for a couple rounds to get it flat and i found that most of the time when i did this if it was oriented like this i could get that to go through the knotters without having a big problem with um untied bales at the end of a ball and sharpen the twine cutting knives at the beginning of every season the knives are right down in here on both sides to get easier access you just undo these two bolts and nuts here slide them out and then this whole thing will rotate up and you can get easier access to the knives they can just be sharpened on a stone just like a household knife and that'll help the twine from getting bound up in the knotters if it cuts cleaner if you're using sisal twine in the baler buy good sisal twine i found there's a real difference if you go to say tractor supply and buy that junk that they're selling there's thick and thin spots in the twine and what happens is the knotters have a harder time holding the twine in place when it's at a thin spot so i go to the dealer and buy the good stuff it's really homogenous uniform as far as thickness goes that helps out a lot remember even if you do all these things you clean out your baler at the end of the year there's always an adjustment period at the beginning of every baling season as everything shines up inside and the knotters get loosened up after you've lubricated them you're bound to miss a few bales in the beginning adjustment period you usually have to mess around with bale tensioning to get it right and that's typical and when it comes to making good uniform bales that thing i said at the beginning of the video about flakes per bale makes a big difference so you know you try and shoot for 15 flakes per bale but obviously that's hard to hit every time it's more like between 10 and 20 for me but the big thing is i would much rather bail in heavy windrows than light windrows so if you're picking up a heavy windrow and you're really working the baler you're going to get a well-shaped bale out of that if you're picking up a really light windrow and it takes a hundred strokes to make a bale that bale is going to come out loose and it's going to come out misshapen so if you have light windrows you either have to increase ground speed quite a bit and your field may be too bumpy for that or while you're raking double and triple those windrows so you can make them into heavy windrows and really make the baler work to make those good bales i hope you enjoyed my little tour of my old new holland baylor i think new holland made the best hang equipment there was back in the era that this baler was made in the 60s and it's a testament to how well they were made that 55 years later with a little tlc this baler is still perfectly useful on small farms like this and there's a lot of small farms around that are still using them so all it takes is a little bit of mechanical aptitude and they're fairly simple machines but very interesting at the same time thanks for joining me and i'll see you next time

Channel: Just a Few Acres Farm

Views: 245,947

Rating: 4.9426932 out of 5

Keywords: small livestock farm, small farm life, farming, farm, homestead, just a few acres farm, new holland 269 square baler, new holland, how square baler works, old new holland baler, square baler maintenance, square baler operation, square baler adjustment, square baler knotter adjustment

Id: Vq_M5jRZW8E

Length: 28min 48sec (1728 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 01 2020