[furrowjockey]

Can anyone out there give me pros and cons of these two units. Which takes less power to run, has less maintenance and does a better job.

 

[Robsworld65]

I ran a RotoGrind for a number of years. One issue that comes to mind is the bolt that holds the mill on to the shaft. be sure you use a soft shear bolt on the pto because changing the bolt on the mill is not a pleasent job.It also tend to plug the chute when chopping wet grasses. Can't comment on Haybuster.

 

[Dan Vanderwell]

Have an H-1000. It's a good machine. Started with 120 hp and that's the least I'd suggest. 180 hp is a nice match. Seen one at the dealer that the rotor was corkscrewed. Apparently 300 hp is a little too much.

Worked good on dry hay and straw. Drop in a tough bale and you have several minutes to kill. Don't put in a tough fescue bale unless you want to go have a coffee. Never did much work to it beyond hammers and screens. Had to put a piece of shaft inside the auger pipe and extend the flighting ~6" otherwise the auger would plug from floating on top of the hay.

Can't comment on the Roto-Grind. Never actually seen one.

Not sure what your plan is? Haven't used the tub grinder in a couple years. Now I just run the bales through the shredder and into the TMR. Lots quicker and less fuel.

 

[2390]

Talked to one guy selling a haybuster 1000,he said it would grind 15 bales in -15 temp an hour.I told him i will stick to having a custom grinder coming to the farm then,his response was why do you think i'm selling it.

 

[offroadnt]

We have an old Roto Grind, I've rebuilt it completely. Was running yesterday and was thinking about your question. Ours is a 1090 and we run it with a 2390. First thing we do when we buy a tub grinder is extend the tub two feet, not really for extra capacity, more for controlling spillage. We are chopping greenfeed with it and you do get a bunch of long straw, we've adjusted the shear bars in but it sure makes the thing noisy but it still has decent capacity. The biggest advantage of this unit is it's simple, it has 11 bearings (not including the wheels) and around 25 big knives, all you need is a thousand RPM PTO, around 10gpm hydraulic flow and twelve volts and your chopping feed. Biggest disadvantage is it's a dusty bugger and you have people running that are a little lower on the IQ spectrum or lacking ambition they will run the tractor in the dust and plug it up in a hurry.

 

[712alberta]

I don't remember what model our Roto Grind was. We had it as long as I can remember. Like offroadnt said they are pretty simple machines. Easy to maintain and simple to use. We ran ours with a 7110 magnum and it was a good match. If I recall it would do a dry round hay bale in about 6-7 minutes and straw in 5-6 minutes. Never really pushed it to hard, and never had to change shear pins. There was, or maybe there still is an adapter to use it to grind high moisture grain. Did that a few times, but high moisture doesn't work the best for our system of feeding. You really have to watch the dust, they are really good at making a nice fine dust, that will plug air filters, rad's, cab filters, and coating everything in a really nice fine dust. It did a really nice job of chopping, it was probably a bit extravagant for our operation chopping no more than 50 hay bales and maybe 100 straw bales on years we fed straw. But in this area it was next to impossible to find a custom guy to come when you needed them, so kind of needed to be able to do it our selfs.

Now we use a highline bale processor with there feed chopper add on for chopping hay. It doesn't cut quite as nice as the Roto Grind, but it does do a nice even job, and we also use it for bedding pens, which is something we couldn't do with our Roto Grind.

 

[farmerandy]

Talked to one guy selling a haybuster 1000,he said it would grind 15 bales in -15 temp an hour.I told him i will stick to having a custom grinder coming to the farm then,his response was why do you think i'm selling it.

We used to get a custom grinder come but now we use a hay buster 1000. It's only slightly slower but we like being able to choose what day we tub grind so the wind doesn't blow dust into our yard, plus we save a ton of money every year.
Only downside is having to replace the auger bearings frequently, and we also had to add extra pulleys so we had 3 belts running the augers. If those augers plug the quickest and easiest way to unplug it is to just take the sprockets off and pull them out, thankfully it rarely plugs since we added that 3rd belt and use a 170 horse tractor on it.