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| Most of the time I am in the truck. The way we run it is rare that we load a truck without a driver in it. If I'm by myself and going more than about 3 miles they just run my butt off. Most times the wagon is loaded and headed to the road by the time I am on the road headed back. If Charlie is helping haul then we get back with the truck in time to wait on a hopper or two, but the driver just stays in the truck because there is not enough time to do anything else. We've tried to use the second truck and one driver, but it doesn't help any. By the time you cool one off and trade trucks and get it warmed up just a tad you could of put the load on the one you were driving. Then every time you switch fields you have to go back and gather up the extra truck. As it is the combine and wagon just head to the next field and when ever someone has time they go shuffle the shop truck, normally after kids get out of school.
If my 82 yr old Dad is in the wagon it is much safer to have him park the wagon and let the truck drive under it. You can watch the air on the tractor then pull up, set the tractor brakes and get out to watch the guage in the box on the trailer. When it's right I just motion to him to shut it down.
The only drawback to a 102X78 trailer is trying to load legal by yourself in the field. I have even started the wagon running and then went and got in the truck to move it up. You can see the air guage on the trailer when you're in the tractor, but if you're really trying to get on the money you normally shut it down just a little short and then get out and look once.
We put a scale on our new wagon last year to try to make it easier to load if someone wasn't in the truck, but the 1050 Kinze unloads so fast the scale can't keep up. We hope we improved on that by installing a hydraulic flow control on it for this year. We'll know in about 6 weeks if it was worth it. If no one is in the truck and Dad's on the wagon we've even go so far as to stop combining when the yield monitor hits 26,000 and send him to the truck with just that much to put on one end, then repeat it.
All that said I would never go back to a short sided trailer. The times when it's inconvient are so few compared to how nice it is to load any other time. Never have to worry about running over the sides. Don't have to constantly keep watching and pulling up. If we are loading legal all it takes is one pile in the front and on in the rear and neither one gets much closer than about 10 or 12 inches from the bottom of a bow, probably down about 2 1/2' on the sides.
Never know what the future will hold, but if we get our toes in the door like we think we might we could very well sell one Timpte and buy an alu. end dump to haul out of the quarry. One of the guys we work with is very well connected with a company that owns a bunch of quarry's. The end dump would not be as nice for corn, but could work the rest of the year. | |
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Rating Grain Hopper Trailers.
