small scale haying

[NH-Rob]

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.

 

[greasemonkeyok]

Your pics make it look like fun.

 

[MIKE R]

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

 

[Soundguy]

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

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

 

[NH-Rob]

here is the link to the manual hay baler: http://www.tillersinternational.org/farming/resources_techguides/ThemiTillersManualHayBalerPlans.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.

 

[flusher]

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

 

[NH-Rob]

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

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.

 

[zzvyb6]

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.

 

[Soundguy]

here is the link to the manual hay baler: http://www.tillersinternational.org/farming/resources_techguides/ThemiTillersManualHayBalerPlans.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.

thanks!

 

[schmism]

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