Jim - 6/6/2022 09:34

We had a few good days last week to make hay. I raked two fields Friday morning and planned to bale Friday afternoon ahead of a weekend forecast of rain.

Everything was going well when I hooked up the baler. I’d had a JD dealer service technician out last fall to fix a net wrap knife problem so was sure the 569 was ready to go…

I fired up the tractor in the yard to check everything out, engaged the pto and watched the belts turn … for a few seconds until the pto shaft ground to a halt.

Long story short, the service tech had not cleared the baler “wrap” signal and as soon as I engaged the pto, the net wrap system started feeding net wrap into an empty running baler. Running that is until the feed shaft above the pickup had so much plastic wrapped around it that it stopped the pto shaft.

Hours later and after using a sawsall on a few of the plastic clamshells I finally got most of the plastic out, about the time the sun was setting o n 30 acres or so of good, dry, hay windrows with rain clouds moving in from the west. Neighbors were all busy with planting ahead of the rain or baling so today the windrows sit with well over an inch of rain on them and clouds and showers predicted for the coming week.

Digging through the inch thick baler manual I did find a page showing how to reset the net wrap knife at the beginning of each season. 

At the dealer Saturday morning to buy clamshells, the parts guy went right to the box of them behind the counter and mentioned this happens regularly: net wrap feeding into an empty baler.  So I thought I’d post about this and urge folks to look up that page in the net wrap section of the manual when starting up the baler.

I have run this baler for 9 seasons now and not had this happen but sure don’t want to do it again and lose more hay over not pushing a couple buttons before turning on the pto.