Re: 7088
I went to Oklahoma this year to help with wheat harvest in june for an uncle (i'm actually from the Netherlands), who had a pre-production model 7088 and a 3yrd old 2388. We had a 36' (or 35?) MacDon drapers on both of them (can't remember the number would have to check video on it).
The biggest problem we had was that you could not run it faster than 2mph. This is in avg 50-60bpa wheat, we had a 2388 running along side of it, which would consistently run about 1mph faster than the 7088. The reason for this was that the 7088 would just not feed right. It would plug up as soon as you pushed it only a litte harder. We had about 4 guys from CIH and one from MacDon trying to figure out what was wrong, tried god knows how many settings for the feeder house <-> header connection but it just wouldn't feed good. It never got fixed during the entire season. Personally, with my limited experience i think it was the combination of header+combine that didn't match. It might have been that according to one of the CIH guys they changed the design of the feeder house only a month or two before, or that the MacDon header was just a lemon.
We also had a complete transmission failure, where the gearbox was destroyed because apparently during production a bearing wasn't properly installed. The transmission broke in less than 24 hours of operating time. After installing the new gearbox, it again broke down after a few days, this time it was impossible to
get the combine in third gear. I had to go back home before they could fix that, and haven't remembered to ask what caused it.
Now, it wasn't all bad. Some good points:
- plenty of power
- plenty of cleaning capacity (if only the d**n thing would actually feed it in..we never got to test it to the limit :/ )
- nice long auger, though it does swivel high into the air and you have to be carefull with strong wind blowing the grain over the cart
- strong lifting capacity. I'm putting this here because the 2388 struggled to keep the heavy MacDon header up - we should probably have used a smaller/lighter one on that.
All in all, the custom harvester i was working for obviously wanted to get rid of the 7088, he's traded it in for a new 7088 for the next season. I know my story is very negative, and to be fair i think we just had a lemon. I think that if you don't have one of these "monday-morning" machines they generally perform very well.
As for the sample, it was about the same as the 2388, but i don't think any combine can be set really well if you can't get enough material in the system for it to clean.
either way, it was the most fun i've ever had on a vacation (even though i was actually "working" heh) so i'm definately hooked to harvesting now...
I went to Oklahoma this year to help with wheat harvest in june for an uncle (i'm actually from the Netherlands), who had a pre-production model 7088 and a 3yrd old 2388. We had a 36' (or 35?) MacDon drapers on both of them (can't remember the number would have to check video on it).
The biggest problem we had was that you could not run it faster than 2mph. This is in avg 50-60bpa wheat, we had a 2388 running along side of it, which would consistently run about 1mph faster than the 7088. The reason for this was that the 7088 would just not feed right. It would plug up as soon as you pushed it only a litte harder. We had about 4 guys from CIH and one from MacDon trying to figure out what was wrong, tried god knows how many settings for the feeder house <-> header connection but it just wouldn't feed good. It never got fixed during the entire season. Personally, with my limited experience i think it was the combination of header+combine that didn't match. It might have been that according to one of the CIH guys they changed the design of the feeder house only a month or two before, or that the MacDon header was just a lemon.
We also had a complete transmission failure, where the gearbox was destroyed because apparently during production a bearing wasn't properly installed. The transmission broke in less than 24 hours of operating time. After installing the new gearbox, it again broke down after a few days, this time it was impossible to
get the combine in third gear. I had to go back home before they could fix that, and haven't remembered to ask what caused it.
Now, it wasn't all bad. Some good points:
- plenty of power
- plenty of cleaning capacity (if only the d**n thing would actually feed it in..we never got to test it to the limit :/ )
- nice long auger, though it does swivel high into the air and you have to be carefull with strong wind blowing the grain over the cart
- strong lifting capacity. I'm putting this here because the 2388 struggled to keep the heavy MacDon header up - we should probably have used a smaller/lighter one on that.
All in all, the custom harvester i was working for obviously wanted to get rid of the 7088, he's traded it in for a new 7088 for the next season. I know my story is very negative, and to be fair i think we just had a lemon. I think that if you don't have one of these "monday-morning" machines they generally perform very well.
As for the sample, it was about the same as the 2388, but i don't think any combine can be set really well if you can't get enough material in the system for it to clean.
either way, it was the most fun i've ever had on a vacation (even though i was actually "working" heh) so i'm definately hooked to harvesting now...
