I had an 8500 for 8 or 9 years. It's a good drill for conventional- or minimum-till. In no-till the openers can ride up out of the ground in tough or dry conditions.

There isn't really any adjustment for down pressure. You can move the boots up or down and change the angle of the point. The trip spring is the limiting factor and that really isn't adjustable. Once the spring tension is overcome the opener is going to run shallower.

I have a neighbor who still uses an 8500 for seeding wheat in chemfallow no-till. He uses a narrow carbide point and gets decent results in reasonably mellow soil. Hard and/or dry soil will cause his drill to produce a somewhat uneven stand.

I used my 8500 for small grains in a minimum-till situation and had very good results. (When I bought a Flexi 5000 a few years ago I switched to straight no-till.) I had good luck with the drill. Some parts are getting hard to find. Axles for the cart wheels, the drive sprocket which mounts on the right-side cart hub and the bushings for the end of the feed shaft where the rate adjuster is are items that seem to be in short supply.

I found that the 8500 was flexible enough to follow the ground well and the seeding rate was fairly accurate. The parts issue is common to most pieces of equipment that have been out of production for quite a few years. The all run monitor is a nice feature, but you will probably find that the majority of the alerts are false alarms resulting from a worn sensor or broken wire. Not having a hopper-bottom tank makes the drill something of a pain to clean out between crops or at the end of the planting season. That's not a job for an old guy like me, but, my son belongs to FFA (father farms alone ). I was happy to get a drill that was easier to clean out.

Mark

 

Hey grandpa mark, did you or could you run fertilizer through the seed side as well and use the tank for deep banding. I would like to deep band with it but will be filling constantly if you can only use the fertilizer side of the tank? Would it ruin the seed feed cups( i forget what its called) if you run fert through it i guess is my question or could it be done that way?

 

We never used ours for all fertilizer but I know some folks who did.

We never put any fertilizer through the 8500; we took the dividers out that separated the front and back sections of the tank and used the drill for all seed. We applied liquid fertilizer separately ahead of the drill.

I don't think running fertilizer through the seed cups would be as much of a problem as trying to deep band with the drill. In a spring like this year you could put fertilizer down to China. In dry conditions it would be hard to keep the openers in the ground.

Mark

 

You can change the divider and the fertilizer sprocket to "band" fertilizer only. With seed the small sprocket will only put down about 85 lbs of fertilizer.

 

thanks for the help, I saw on the little video on youtube that with a quick adjustment you could use the unit to deep band. I just bought the thing and the owner could not find the manual at the time. He has now so I'm going to pick it up soon. I would like to put down about 165lbs deep banding. is this possible? I read on here before the guys were saying through the fert cups you could max out at about 85 lbs. Any help would be appreciated on how to set it up to do more. Thanks trent

 

Once you get the manual it will tell you how to do all of this.

 

perfect, thanks guys