Hydraulic Reel Drive for MF 850

I assume that the pickup on your pickup header is belt driven and not hydraulic. Some of the older MF combines did not have the hyd reel pump system on the combine. What are you doing with your current straight cut header? If you are scrapping it would the hyd system fit on your new header? The only other way would be to get all the reel drive pump systems parts of a wrecked unit and install on your combine.

all 850/860's standard or hydrostatic drive had hydraulic reel drive. the pump was located on the right side of the combine and driven off the rear beater. the hoses from the pump ran down the feeder to the header and either drove the pickup or the reels. your combine should be equipped with a 9001 pickup header and any 9000 series strait cut header ranging from 18' to 24' for the 850 ( 9018, 9020, 9022, and 9024 ). hope this helps.

Do you have a 3" dial in your cab that says reel speed? Or so you have a +/- switch on the end of the reel lift lever?


Early ones were electric sheave adjusters. Later... I think '83 they switched to the hydraulic setup.

I currently have a straight cut header with bat reels driven by a pump mounted directly on the header. There is a 2 gallon reservoir and a small belt drive. The reel speed is controlled by the electrical button on the reel lever.
The reels for the header I wanted to buy are powered directly from the combine hydraulics. I wanted to know 2 things:
Does my combine have the lines on the right side somewhere that I'm just not seeing?(I believe its an 1982 MF850)
Or is there an add on pump to make this work? I dont want to take the pump off the header I have now as I may use it again.

I dug out some old sales brochures '81 & '82 had the electric adjuster '83 to '88 had the hydraulic adjuster. the 9000 series headers were introduced in '83. you might be able to get the parts you need at a salvage yard not sure what it would take to hook it all up. I think it would be a big job as you need the controller,pump,wiring,hoses,sheave and belt

no your combine does not have the lines .

We had the exact same situation with an 83 850 when we wanted to convert the pickup to hydraulic drive. We got a hydraulic pump that runs off the beater (after 83 models) and installed an electric hydraulic flow controller to vary the oil output. We then wired the switch in the cab that used to control the electric sheaves to the hydraulic flow controller. It then worked the same way as the newer models, just didn't use the factory variable reel speed controller (dial in cab) . There is a different drive mechanism needed for the straw chopper drive that allows the pump to be run off a belt on the beater pulley.

The whole setup is now on a parts machine as we are running later models (2 - 87 850s) with the entire setup being factory.

I can take some pictures if that helps. The whole system would be for sale if you like. Combine is located near Outlook SK.