small scale haying

With the new haying forum I thought it would be good to post some pictures of how my family and I made some hay this summer. We do not need a whole lot of hay as we only have one sheep and 16 chickens and raise two pigs a year.
The photos are not in order but I started with mowing with the sickle bar mower and then hand tedded the hay for a couple of days. I then hand raked it into a windrow before the family helped me pick it up. We then ran the hay through the manual hay baler that I built off plans from the internet. As you can see even my wifes dog was helping with the process. After the seeing that the baling process worked well I upgraded to a small two basket kuhn hay tedder and put a hydraulic cylinder on the baler. If any one is interested I can take some pictures of my upgrades. We still need to bale up our third cut as it is sitting on my trailer in loose form right now.

Your pics make it look like fun.

Looks like fun. Thank you for the pictures. The baler utilizes the same principle as the first balers and hay presses.

neat.. mind if i ask where you found the plans?

i'd like to do something similar, small scale.. etc..

here is the link to the manual hay baler: http://www.tillersinternational.org/...BalerPlans.pdf I did stray from the plans some as I was using used lumber that we had laying around and had to adjust the dimensions some.

Neat stuff. How many acres of hay do you think you baled this time?

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Originally Posted by flusher

Neat stuff. How many acres of hay do you think you baled this time?

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Not sure I could put it into acres. I mow spots around the dairy farm that are between the barns and around manure piles. On my secound cut I mowed 5 different sections and I made 23 bales. First cut we got more bales but they were not compacted as tight. I expect to get another 15 or so when I get around to baling up the hay on my trailer.

Interesting and good use of materials via creativity. YouTube shows a similar apparatus in use. However, the bale case is mounted vertcally and the plunger lever is horizontal so that a person uses their weight to compact the hay via a lever ratio of about 3 - 4:1. They got some decent looking bales from it.

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Originally Posted by NH-Rob

here is the link to the manual hay baler: http://www.tillersinternational.org/...BalerPlans.pdf I did stray from the plans some as I was using used lumber that we had laying around and had to adjust the dimensions some.

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thanks!

so build it as an attachment to the end of your wood splitter and take the work out of the compression stroke