PRESEASON COMBINE MAINTENANCE

Spending time in the shop now saves you time and money during harvest.

- Karen Jones and Dave Mowitz

While it’s hard to quantify the cost of a downtime day during harvest, it’s something nobody wants to deal with. Jake Koehn, technician at Diamond K Combine Repair in the southwest Kansas community of Lakin, stays busy with preseason combine checkups and in-season repairs. 

“When things break during harvest, they usually require more parts to fix,” says Koehn, who services 30 to 40 combines per year. “For example, a loose bearing caught during preseason would only require a new bearing and flanges. But if it goes out completely, it may ruin a shaft, or belt, or other surrounding parts, as well as contribute to lost time in the field, or possibly even start a fire.”

Koehn recommends setting aside a full day to inspect your machine, and an additional three to five days for repairs, depending on what’s needed and parts availability. 

Here’s a list of areas that may need preseason repair and adjustment:

Check common WEAR POINTS

Koehn starts his inspections by starting up and running the machine for an hour or so. After he removes the shields, he lets the combine run, and walks around it, “listening for noises that don’t seem quite right,” he says. 

Examine belts and covers for separation, missing chunks, burned streaks, and grooves in their sides. Those symptoms can indicate a misadjusted belt or worn pulley, or foretell an impending failure such as a bearing or bushings going bad. Feeder house belts are designed to transfer a lot of power on the sides of the belts, so Koehn pays special attention to burned spots or cracks on the sides. 

He also uses a thermal imaging camera or temperature gun to check bearing temperatures. 

“If you’ve let the machine run, and one bearing is way hotter than the rest, that one needs attention,” Koehn says. He also uses a pry bar to pull on all the bearings to see whether there is any play that shouldn’t be there.