I don't know the answer to your question, but the lateral tilt is easily removed if that helps. Have you checked on a Bish adaptor? I know they adapt a lot of headers.

Didn't you say you bought a Challenger corn head?

 

Thanks. I forgot to call Bish yesterday and they're not open today so I figured I would ask on here.

Somewhere I had read the lateral tilt made the feederhouse opening too tall to be adapted to a Deere head without essentially ruining the Deere header for a Deere combine.

I am a fan of corn heads that come as close to leaving the corn stalk standing as possible. I am going to try grinding knives down on a few rows of the Challenger head and see how it works this year, but if a Deere head with fluted rolls leaves more corn residue standing than I can get out of the Challenger, I'll probably switch in the future.

In the meantime, we have three John Deere heads as a result of preferring different heads to our harvesters and if I could move those easier now that I have a combine, I would be inclined to buy an adapter right away.

Unfortunately for me, I realized after Kevin answered my "will it NOT chop?" question he probably meant you could get it without lawnmower blades. I would imagine he didn't mean you could leave the stalks standing like a old John Deere head with tapered fluted rolls.

 

In regards to the lateral tilt, we usually cut straight across terraces so I guess I wouldn't be terribly excited about giving that up.

Thanks again for the thoughts though.

 

Are you growing dryland or irrigated corn?

 

Both but most of it is dryland. I could imagine a scenario where we would use the Challenger head on irrigated and a Deere head on the dryland.

 

I'm just being curious now, but how do you keep from building up to much residue over time on your irrigated? Crop rotation?

 

Harvest crew has JD 612C heads with knives on the stalk rolls. Not chopping heads though. I guess too much residue has not been a problem. We probably grow corn 9 years out of 10 on the irrigated (except one field that has poor water). Our irrigated is our only ground where we do not pursue notill. We strip till it every year.

I have never experienced too much residue, even behind 250+ bushel irrigated corn. Perhaps if I started cutting it with tapered fluted rolls though, I might.

 

Why do ya like to leave the stalk intact? I like mine at the very least crimped so I can speed up decomposition. I normally run my header pretty low so I can chop up as much of the stalk as I can. I also run a 3000 series corn header.

 

In our area, on the dryland, getting residue to decompose is not an obstacle. Our preference is to have the residue on top of the soil as long as possible so it helps reduce evaporation and increase water infiltration. Since we want residue to last as long as possible, we want the exact opposite of you so we want the corn stalk to be as close to undamaged as possible and still be able to harvest the ear.

 

Yes you can adapt a deere head to a lateral tilt. I personally havent done it but have seen a bish adapter modified for it. It was a little over a year ago so I can't remember exactly how it was set up but I took some pictures which also aren't much better because it was packed into the back of a shed and hard to get to.

 

Hey, thanks for the pictures. Glad to know it's possible.

 

Clark machine in South Dakota. Mounts on the back of the head, running Deere corn heads and row crop heads. Plated we're 1500 about 3 years ago.