Round Bale attachment

[nvlong4n1]

We were at the Sunbelt Expo show two weeks ago and a number of people came by and asked if we had a way to handle round bales of hay. We are considering adding a bale spear option to our fork attachment and our root rake brush grapple. I'm also considering adding a round bale handling attachment to our product line and thought I would ask you (the end user) what you would like to see in a bale handling attachment. I'm thinking of something that would squeeze the bale to move it and a separate attachment to unroll a bale. We make a sod un roller and many people asked if they could unroll hay with it. It is a little small to do hay. Any thoughts or comments of what you would like to see in a bale handling attachment are very much appreciated.

Nelson
wrlonginc

 

[Bird]

I'm thinking of something that would squeeze the bale to move it

I'm not sure why they weren't more popular, but I've only seen one attachment of that type and don't know who made it. It had one advantage that I could see. Most round bale moving attachments, such as spears and carryalls, pick up the bales from the end while the guy with a hydraulic attachment on his old Ford tractor's 3-point hitch picked them up from the side and he could lift them high enough to easily load then onto the rail type hay wagons we were using. The wagons held 5 bales at a time and with two wagons hooked to the truck, it did make it simple for him to load them from the side.

 

[hudr]

We have a 3pt hay unroller (forget the mfg). Biggest problem with it is you need a good sized tractor to haul hay w/ it. It has two arms that squeeze the bale and a spinning spike at 90 Degrees on the end of each arm to unroll the bale. Problem is the bale ends up so far away from the tractor it has too much leverage and gets too heavy for the tractor to pick. I end up moving the bale to the field w/ my FEL, cutting the string, setting the bale down then backing up to it w/ the unroller. Of course, during all of this my bovine buddies are crowding around and getting in the way. I guess this boils down to this: whatever you build, keep the weight close to the tractor.
If it would run off the FEL, I guess you could put a conventional spear on a hydraulic motor that would spin the bale as you backed up... I have seen those in a 3pt config.