baling wheat straw from a 2188

Round, small square, or big square bales?

sorry..small wire tied squares

Its possible, not very easy though. When i ran a 2188 combine for a couple seasons if you cut early in the am or late in the pm it seemed like it would windrow itself. There is either a picture here or on agtalk where someone completely took the chopper off of thier 8010 and it had a perfect windrow.

Like stated about it is possible, we had a guy do this behind our 2388. Set the chopper all the way down (corn setting or whatever) so the blades werent up. Then took the rear spreaders off or course.

Set straw chopper on corn setting, slow speed, knives removes and pan under chopper drum lowered. We also remove every other hammer of the chopper drum.

Cant you just drop the straw and not run through the chopper?

No, the chopper is what removes the straw from the rotor. Axial flow combines come with either a chopper or a beater. I've been baling straw behind a 1660 for 10 yrs. My combine has a beater rather than a chopper though. Great for making good straw but bad to plant behind. The best way to get good straw is to cut lower, cut when the straw is encased(slightly damp in the morning or evening) and bale the straw that you harvest first when it is ripe before the straw gets too brittle.

If you search for" baling straw with 2388" you will get more info. We leave spreaders on an fit sheets to leave a more baler friendly windrow not driven down into stubble pictures in above thread.

On our 2188 we usually take out half the blades on the chopper for baling behind, just wondering has anyone removed all blades? will it just drop the straw down on to the sieves and mess up air flow to the sieves?

If baling straw was extremely important, I would look for a machine with a beater and a standard rotor. The standard rotor doesn't tear up the straw as bad as a specialty rotor. Keep the concaves as open far as you can and still get a good sample, and run smooth slotted grates.

Humidity makes a big difference. If it's 100 degrees and 9% humidity, you're not going to have good straw no matter what.

smallholder, we tried removing 2/3 of them one year but plugged up the back end a time or two. There was a lot of straw that year. Now we play it safe and just remove half of them.

The AFX rotor is also very gentle on straw, even compared to the standard rotor IMO. I saw one set up where they made curtains to make a nicer windrow that looked like a heck of a setup.