This stuff was short and like baling feathers.
Before I wax on my JD348, I'm not making any commentary on any other baler - IMHO, they're all good.
Several things about this baler make it IMHO very good in thin grasses like I dealt with today. First, the pickup has 6 bars with narrow tine spacing, what New Holland would call "super sweep". I think my old NH68's wide tine spacing and 4 bars would have left a goodly bit of hay behind. The JD pickup - picked up some hay that the rake didn't touch. Not much hay in this second cut, basically clipping the field and gleaning the hay off it. The 348 did an great job of it.
Next, IMHO the JD auger and packer fork allows one to use the baler as a high capacity unit or slow it down to an 80 stroke machine, like a 336 or a 65ish strokes like a 24t. Slow the rpms, reducing capacity and maintaining or increasing ground speed to fill the pickup. I ran the JD348 at about 75 strokes per minute and upped the ground speed in these thin windrows and the baler performed consistently like it was on a heavier first cut, full pick-up and full charge going to the plunger. IMHO the key to this is the auger. Regardless of the rpms, that auger is turning and pushing hay to the plunger side at all times.
The pickup width: I raked several windrows together. This was hay in two days including a late Friday evening mowing/very early Saturday mowing to finish. Tedded on Saturday afternoon, mostly to bust up any slugs of grass, raked today (Sunday) and baled starting at 3:30 pm. Given the short cut to bale timeline, I laid the final two passes of windrows side to side to give the hay as much sun surface area as possible to assist drying. I couldn't have done this with the narrow pickup on the old NH68, but the wide pickup of the JD348 made it possible. BTW - the Agtronix BH-2 read 10.5 to 13 percent humidity the whole time I was baling.
Finally - the this second cut and as I mentioned was thin and even with raking windrows together, they were inconsistent, thick/thin. So I would vary the baler rpms/ground speed to accommodate as I mentioned above. For this application, the traditional side pull type pickup was very nice. Easy on the neck looking back for a view of the pickup the whole time I was baling to make on the fly speed/rpm adjustments. The JD348 pickup is wide open and very easy to see completely into it and see what's going on.
All in all, had a good day of it. Really liking this JD348.
YMMV
Bill
JD348 - Some Reasons Why I Like It....
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