Through my travels with MacDon I get to meet quite a few operators. A common thing that I notice is that many of them are familiar with how to raise and lower the header raise and lower the reel, move the reel fore and aft and whatnot, but when to do that is is often information that’s missing. Just a small adjustment can make a world of difference, and now I’m going to explain to you how to do all of that.

Once we’ve established what our field needs to look like what our stubble height should look like what our swath or window should look like we then approach the uncut crop and put the header down on the ground and walk out and go have a look. From there we can look at things like our skid shoes set to the right position to achieve the stubble height that we want is our guard angle working with our skid shoes to achieve that goal. Our reel being one of the most important features of our machine especially with the Draper header. How is it engaging the crop? And what’s its relationship with the cutter bar? That’s going to translate into how we lift the crop up to the knife and how that crop transitions over the cutter bar on to the drapers. We might need to adjust our cam setting. When we adjust our cam setting it kind of changes how the reel engages the crop but also its release points over the Drapers. So if we move our reel forward  quite a bit we may want to consider increasing the cam numbers so that the fingers hold onto the crop longer and carry that crop onto the Drapers rather than releasing it over the cutter bar.

From a position like this if we were next to some uncut crop we could easily see the relationship between the reel the crop and our knife. Looking here it appears that our header height and even our guard angle or our tilt is appropriate to do a pretty nice job with a clean cut. But if this were a large crop that was really down and needed the assistance of the reel, you can move the reel by hand here and see that this reel is nowhere near engaging the crop before the cutterbar. So, from here it’s pretty obvious that we would want to move our reel down and probably forward to have this reel actually really dig into the crop lift it up and present it to the knife. Now when we move our reel forward we’re obviously affecting the release point of the crop by the reel. When we move the reel forward we want to ensure on the back end of the reel where those fingers go vertical and drop the crop that it’s on the Drapers and not on the cutter bar. To adjust the release point of the reel. We can do that by adjusting our cam position.

There’s results but there’s also consequences. Moving your reel forward picks up the crop assists in picking up down crop, but a consequence of that is it’s released from the reel sooner. Potentially over the knife instead of on to the drapers. On the back side of the reel the fingers will go vertical as they move up to reel. And that is the release point of the crop. We don’t want that to be over the cutter bar because the cutter bar is not going to be moving the crop away. To deal with that consequence we have another adjustment which is the cam adjustment which will you know then allow us to hold on to that crop long enough to deposit it onto the Drapers.

The reel cam position adjustment is done on the right hand side of either reel. The higher the number the longer the reel will hold on to the crop. The right hand reel closest to you, it’s cam position is at two and you could see that a cam setting of four holds on to the crop a lot longer allowing the reel to carry the crop onto the Drapers as opposed to cutting it over to the cutting components or cutter bar. Now for the fore-aft position that we have on this particular reel, I’d say that setting is inadequate. It’s releasing the crop too early. You can see on the backside the fingers go vertical they would release the crop and that would be right over the cutter bar. We want to make sure that the reel holds on to the crop long enough to be deposited on the drapers so that it can be taken away quickly.

Now you may be wondering what reel cam position should I be using? Well, you can refer to this handy dandy chart for guidance for standing and delicate crops. Use the cam setting 1 or 2 in mostly standing crops. 2 or 3 should do just fine in partially lodged crop use three and in severely large crop. Put your reel cam in position four. Be sure to refer to this entire chart for other header settings to help you get more from your harvest. Now how to change your reel cam position.

These are sort of your key points. This is the pin that locks it in place, that is where you put your tool to rotate the cam, and then your different locations are right in there. There’s position one, we’re currently in position two and we can go all the way to position four. To rotate this cam the first thing that we’re going to do is use our multi-tool and we’re going to unlock the pin. We rotate this into the unlock position, the pin is now disengaged from the cam. Caution: Keep your hands clear when removing the pin. The reel cams can rotate when unlocked. Now we’re in position four and we’ll just relock the pin, sometimes you need to just wiggle the cam a little bit to get the pin to engage. And then down here on the other reel is the pin. Now I rotate the cam, to whichever position they want. Here we’ll install it in position four to match the outside reel and now just wiggle the cam a little bit, and that’s how you adjust the reel cams. In most cases you’re going to want to run the cams in the same position. So, if the left side is in four the right side should also be in four.

Contrary to popular belief the cam setting on the reel doesn’t really change how aggressive the crop is in the reel. But it does affect how long the crop is held on to on the backside of the reel. Looking down this particular reel. This one is set at a composition of four and the other one at two. And you can see that the aggressiveness of the fingers on the front side is not really different.

A customer that was cutting some some really down rye grass. As I approach the field I see a really ragged kind of stubble being left. We were skipping over a lot of crop because it was out down and lodged. So when we got out of the machine again I think we raised the skid shoes a little bit to get a little bit closer shave. and increase our increase our garden angle slightly. Gave us definitely an opportunity to do a cleaner cut but that was only half of the story. So the next thing we did was ensure that when our reel it was that we move our reel far enough forward so that those fingers were actually scraping that crop and pulling it up and presenting it to the knife to be cut. And then when we moved our reel forward again we just double checked our position to ensure that or the release point of the crop was far enough on to the Drapers that that crop wouldn’t collect on the cutter bar itself.

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