Once upon a time, small square bales were collected and stacked using spear tracks on wagons towed behind balers; today these have been replaced with long motorized conveyors known as hay elevators. Hay elevator conveyors can save time when stacking bales in a barn or shed. Additionally, they're great tools for wrapping silage bales!
1. Motor
If you keep livestock (especially horses), then you are likely familiar with the small square bales that provide their primary food source. Even small herds can go through hundreds of these bales each year, making hauling by hand an exhausting endeavor.
Hay elevator conveyors would make this task significantly simpler. These self-contained pieces of equipment resemble long, metal conveyor belts with teeth designed to grip onto hay bales as they pass overhead, then release them at their destination when finished - ready for someone to collect and put into stacks for stacking later.
These electric hay elevators provide the added benefit of being used in places without convenient tractor access, making them an excellent solution for barns or granaries without enough room for full-sized hay elevators, or those looking for an alternative solution without investing in an entire tractor-mounted lift system.
Ben Stone offers plans for creating your own hay bale elevator if you want to build it yourself. As a retired Engineer himself, he drafts these projects himself using AutoCAD software and has over three decades of experience working in the construction industry. He studied Engineering during the early 1980s.
2. Belt
Large square and round bales of hay, straw, and silage can be difficult for one person to move by themselves. Even small bales often weigh several hundred pounds; an animal farm raising livestock such as goats, sheep or cattle may go through hundreds of these each year. When stacking these bales they must be handled carefully because moisture and heat inside can reach ignition temperatures under certain weather conditions and cause spontaneous combustion if improperly stored - this is why large bales should usually be stacked tall and sturdy to minimize risks caused by fires.
Farmers use various tools and devices to make large rectangular bales easier to handle, including spear forks attached to tractor front loaders or telehandlers, hay squeeze hooks on tractor buckets, and the hay elevator as tools that help them stack these bales into high stacks more quickly and reduce manual handling of bales.
To form the bales, hay is fed into a chamber that runs the length of one side (typically right when looking at it from the front) of the baler and closed with a combination plunger/knife closure system. A roll of plastic cling wrap is stretched tight over each bale until it's tightly sealed; this usually takes around 20 seconds per bale. Once ready for distribution from behind the baler, these bales may either drop to the ground directly below or be sent onto wagons that come in behind it for transport.
3. Conveyor Bed
Built specifically to handle small square bales of hay or straw for agricultural and commercial use. It features a kiln-dried wood slider bed for quiet operation as well as an easy-drive pulley system.
A conveyor belt has the power to make your work more manageable and reduce the time spent moving heavy materials around. However, just like any piece of equipment, conveyors pose serious injury risks if not used according to their recommended safety protocols.
One of the primary challenges associated with conveyors is keeping them on their intended course, oftentimes making tracking straight impossible. This issue can be caused by numerous factors including improper belt cutting or tension and it's also important that any buildup around them be eliminated to avoid crookedness in tracking.
To fix a conveyor that's tracking incorrectly, first, turn off its motor before beginning to adjust idler rollers to correct its alignment. Start from the tail pulley and work your way towards the front of the conveyor until all idlers have been adjusted correctly; once finished, check to see that its belt tracks correctly by itself; if that still doesn't help adjust the tail pulley before cold curing as an alternative solution (which involves applying special cement that fills any gouges or scoring on its belt surface).
4. Brackets
Working with hay bales requires handling them for storage and transport, which poses some potential dangers such as falling or rolling; falling objects; respiratory illnesses caused by dust; as well as dust-mold-induced lung problems. Workers handling these materials should adhere to occupational health and safety guidelines to protect themselves.
Hay elevators or stackers make loading and stacking much simpler. A single elevator can move more hay each day than three people could by using only trucks and pop-up loaders.
It consists of a frame and conveyor bed attached with a hydraulic chute, equipped with a grate housing the hydraulic chute to line up and prevent tipping over of hay bales. Furthermore, this device features a bar that enables users to pick up bales without touching them directly.
This DIY project requires some assembly but is straightforward enough that anyone can complete it within hours and save both time and effort in doing it themselves. Ben Stone of Canada designed its plans; he studied engineering during the early 80s before going on to work for over 30 years in the construction industry before building cool items around his cabin and farm while always coming up with innovative plans!
5. Fittings
This website not only offers plans for hay bale elevators but also features many DIY projects - like building your hay loader that can be mounted onto any truck or trailer platform for convenient one-person handling of hay, made entirely out of recycled car parts - that make this easy and inexpensively feasible for ranchers.
Ben Stone, a retired Engineer in Canada, designed these DIY plans for a hay bale conveyor. His passion lies in building cool items around his farm and cabin; therefore he keeps adding new plans to this website.
Round bale feeders allow sheep to feed from all directions around a bale and are held together with bale strings, making feeding easy for each sheep. Unfortunately, better portions are often hidden in lower regions of the feeder which could potentially cause instability if used on uneven or hilly terrain.
Hilly terrain necessitates extra precaution when harvesting and storing hay fields, to prevent holes in the ground and drop-offs from occurring. Choose a tractor with an ample load capacity and drive carefully to prevent rollovers. Be sure to follow harvest and storage practices, such as using straps with 1.5 times their load capacity when securing large bales of hay for harvest or storage purposes; keep a close eye on the center of gravity of wagon or trailer when transporting heavy loads and always wear seat belts when transporting heavy loads when transporting heavy loads - always wear seat belts!
6. Frame
A basic hay conveyor frame can be constructed out of twox4s. Once assembled, this frame can be customized with various attachments such as hydraulic chute and grate systems that prevent tripping hazards as well as shield the motor from debris build-up - providing additional features which increase efficiency of bale conveyor.
As the bale moves along its track, it passes underneath two automatic cutters that shear or snip the three wires binding it together longitudinally. Once cut, augers compress it further before pushing it upward through the track into the chamber of a compression device that's mechanically tripped to trigger a knotting cycle where multiple knotters (4-6 is typical) tie off into tight knots that retain their shape.
Once the hay is ready to be released into a mow, valve 84 must be moved into position to raise frame 38 away from the bale and open its cutters. From here it is expelled through an opening in guide rails 63 and 62 before being directed toward a hay-mow by the inward action of angers; augers 11 and 12 then operate to rotate up through space between them until finally its combined support and guide means 13 can be easily detached from its base member 10 and transported directly where ever needed in a field location where needed.