Goodness that sounds horrible. I can’t say enough good about our Macdon FD235s. We found them pretty much flawless. If a header was giving me that much trouble, it would be gone. Sorry for your troubles, no header should be like that.

 

Did you put a 1000 hours on it?!

 

No Don, just one season. Only 600 hours

 

Other than that, how did you like the play miss Lincoln?

 

Cant believe I didn’t think of that!

 

That is absolute JUNK!

 

There must be something wrong with that header. Have run one for 2 seasons now and probably replaced 10 guards and used a box of knife sections. Most of them were when combining peas. Same thing with the auger fingers. That’s on 10,000 acres. That being said it will get new knives and guards for next year

 

Sorry to confuse, the title of the thread should say HD50F Review

I know of several other owners experiencing similar issues. Most will be switching to something else for next year. The RDF40 and 740FD were great headers for me but John Deere took 2 steps forward and 10 steps back on this HD50F. I would love to experiment with modifications, but then I remembered what I paid for this header and think the manufacturer owes it to me to develop solutions.

 

If you want a 50’ there is only one something else.

 

Two, if you are willing to stoop to the level of a Honeybee.

 

Geringoff is going to have a good 50’

 

If you want a 50’ there is only one something else.

Geringoff is going to have a good 50’

Two, if you are willing to stoop to the level of a Honeybee.

Ok, fine!
Only one I‘d consider, lol..

 

So, may I ask what are the issues with honeybee?

 

How do you find all this stoppage time? You must have incredible patience? Or were you losing your cool quite a bit?

15 stops a quarter section to fix the header?? I’ve never heard such a thing.

 

I've run 7500 ac on a fd240 with plug free guards ! 0 broken sickles or guards! 0 down time period!

 

I will have to quiz my pal who runs 22 HD50Fs! Seems like your experience is a disaster!

 

Those both Honeybee?

 

yup

 

The honey bees do have a suspension, but I think the Macdon is much more advanced.

 

I had a friend who use to have an Honeybee airflex but thought the air bags were for knife flexing not overall header floatation, my mistake.

 

Don you were right the first airflex didn't have a sub frame it was added later .It was like the curved shield they tried instead of a pea auger that didnt work very well either.

 

Ah, I remember my friend installing that curved shield, of all the ideas I’d seen at the time that one was the most recent.

 

The Honeybee Airflex actually comes with two options - a rigid subframe with flexing cutterbar, and a floating subframe more like the MacDon.

 

Your dealer needs to talk to Mother Deere Wheaty1 and get you another cutterbar
There’s definitely something not right with that one.

 

Your dealer needs to talk to Mother Deere Wheaty1 and get you another cutterbar
There’s definitely something not right with that one.

I think this is good advice, I talked to my friend who runs 22 of them and they had very few problems over 140, 000 acres!!

 

6300 acres per combine, that is crazy and to do it with so many combines is an even bigger feat. Efficiency really falls off as combine numbers increase.