In a hurry at the moment otherwise I would write you a bit more... but we priced a 730 and 740 last year and the 740 was right around 400k list price pretty well setup. The 730 was about 15k less I think. I can dig out my actual bid sheets later.

I think from our experience you can cash out a Lexion about the same as you can a Case. My neighbor bought a new 7120 this year cash after his 7088 burned last fall. I think doing some farmer math that his machine was about the same price as my 740. But its hard to figure with trades on a new machine... with heads and all that included.

more later...

 

The corn we were in during that demo was around 21%M so header loss was not really a factor. The only differences we noticed in the heads was how clean they picked.

Although I did do a comparrison of my neighbors drago to my geringhoff last year in dry corn. It was not in the same field so I don't put much stock in it... but the corn was running around 16-17% in both fields. I thought the drago was doing a little better job with less butt shelling... but without running them side by side I can't say for sure.

Don't get me wrong here... I haven't ridden in the combine with you, but if you can get a 2577 to do what you say, I think I should have traded my 7120 for a 5088.

6mph in 220bpa corn with an 8 row head is about 3200bph... thats a repectable number for a class 7 machine... let alone a class 5.

But any time I hear people say the combine has no loss, I urge them to look a bit harder. Its impossible to set a combine for zero loss.

I have some 2' x 5' frames with screen door material between it that I toss on the ground under the combine and catch the losses... this is really the only way to accurately measure losses. I do it both spreading the residue and windrowing it. When I spread it I use 1.8 kernals per sq ft as 1 bpa loss. When I windrow it i go by the charts depending on how wide the head is.

All in all my point is make sure you accurately measure your losses and do it frequently. That will really give you a good feel for what you and your machine are capable of.

I don't care what brand of combine it is... if you know how to run it and are satisfied with the job its doing then you are "Winning!" as Charlie Sheen would say.

 

Yes, 220 bpa at 6 mph is very good!

We bought our new unbuilt 740TT at about 303K, pretty well loaded IMO.
It was a few thousand cheaper than a new 9770 and several cheaper than a 7120, both with average sized duals. A good buy IMO.

What I really like about the lexion corn head is the deckplates have a bevel UP instead of down. By doing so, the loose kernals get pulled up by the gathering chains into the auger trough, instead of falling down through the knive rolls toward the ground.

 

Thank you guys for the reply. I think I will get a price from the nearest dealer to see apples for apples comparison. We use to have an awesome lexion dealer down the street, but Cat made them accept a buyout by a big company. I will say that I am not interested in the 7120 from Case at all. I think the design of the older style like the 6088 (2588) is better. We have our 2577 set up to load the shoe perfectly even. It is amazing how even this rotor loads the shoe. I haven't seen a single 7120 or 8120 load the cleaning system as evenly. Our combine took quite some time to get it dialed in correctly. In fact, we hated the machine at first. It threw 8 bushel out the back of the machine using factory settings. Our dealer gave us the biggest help with some simple advice. He said that the Case rotor doesn't separate corn very good with normal rotor speeds. He said that super low rotor speeds is the key to low rotor loss in corn. He recommended rotor speeds well below 300 rpm. This cut our rotor loss drastically, but we cut our losses even further by taking every other wire out of the large wire concaves. I believe this helps for 2 very big reasons. First, this completely stops the concaves from plugging up with cobs. Second, it lets bigger pieces of material out of the concaves which are way easier to filter than small bits of cobs and residue. We also found out that the slow rotor rpm eliminates separation loss almost completely, but sometimes hurt just a little with the threshing. We found that it is a must to retard only the veins over the concave. We found no gain at all by retarding veins over the separation grates. It is also a must to keep our combine as full as we can. The loss goes up if we don't have enough corn in it. We do run a drago corn head which does eliminate trash from entering the combine. This might make a huge difference also, but that is the only head we have so I don't know how the machine would act with a different head. We also grow a very high test weight corn so that helps a little also.

As you can see we have to do a lot of stuff to make our combine work like it does. The lexion seems to be more adaptable, and I was hoping we wouldn't have to tweek it so much to get the same performance. It takes a few hours to be able to switch our combine from corn to soybeans. This isn't that big of a deal, but it would be a bonus if the lexion didn't require that. I also think the lexion would be better in drought corn. Our rotor is excellent in normal conditions, but will lose a lot more corn in drought conditions. It is so important to keep a rotor full or loss gets out of hand.

Bleedred, I use old sand screens to check loss. I do this every few hundred acres, and check visually the rest of the time. I have found that visually checking takes more time than using screens because you have to be so much more careful to find all the corn. I use the screens to check cornhead loss also. I stop the combine right after I pass the screen with my front wheels to do this.

You guys gave me some hope. I had always been told that a lexion will cost double the other color of combines so it is a nice surprise to hear that they are pretty close in price.

 

Your thinking on red machines mirrors mine to a T. We ran 88's for 15 years. Run one of the last 8010's made, its a good machine.......

What you say about the shoe is spot on. They should have kept augers in that machine instead of a shaker, and now the Deere guys will have the pleasure of what a rethresher does in wet corn.


Lexions are not perfect, but they walk on water in my mind, compared to what Ive demoed in the past.


I won't say a lexion will be the cheapest combine you will ever run, but I will say our experience for the last ten years and 3 machines have been worth it.

The red machine ya have has to be one of the best 8 row corn machines built.....Unfortunately when ya add 25% more corn coming in, things change in many departments.

Happy shopping

 

Glad to hear you are tossing screens down. I think once a guy does that a few times and gets a feel for what hes looking at... the visual inspections become much more accurate. Its the guys that just hop out every now and again and kick some leaves around and say... looks good, that I worry about!

Sounds like you have your machine pretty well figured out. I will say that I doubt a Lexion will take any less "tweaking", but it sure seems to me that the tweaking is MUCH easier to do. Really the only thing that will actually take physical work is changing the APS grates... which takes one guy about 15mins to do with little effort. Everything else it built it to the machine... the disawning plate... being able to adjust the threshing and seperating independantly... etc.

It sounds to me that you guys like to take the time to make your machine perform as good as possible... I think a Lexion would be a great machine for people with your mentality. Talk to your dealer and get a demo... you won't be wasting your time.

And I agree with your take on the new style Case machines... if we would have stuck with a red one... it would have been a 7088.