It has been quite a year for round baler developments, with Lely Welger launching its continuous round baler. Austrian firm Pöttinger also introduced its own round baler line. Fellow Austrian firm Göweil has also entered the round baler market, with a fixed chamber baler.

In Ireland, the Göweil brand is handled, somewhat quietly, by Lely Ireland. Lely has been selling Göweil combination baler-wrapper units, wrappers and handlers here for well over a decade. The Göweil combination unit has built up a solid reputation as a robust and reliable machine with which virtually any round baler can work.

Göweil now brings its own fixed chamber baler to the market with the introduction of the Göweil G1-F125. This is a heavy-duty baler designed for high-use or a contractor’s machine. With a bale chamber measuring 1.2m x 1.25m, the G1-F124 produces a bale of approximately the same dimensions (4’ x 4’).

Göweil baler innovation

The G1-F125 incorporates several new and innovative features, starting with the pickup. Like many balers on the market, the pickup on the Göweil G1-F125 is a camless unit. Nothing remarkable there but what is remarkable is that all the pickup bands are made of plastic.

According to Göweil, the plastic pickup bands on the G1-F125 baler will not bend on collision with a foreign object and help with material flow into the baler. Of greater significance though is the pendulum design of the pickup.

To allow its 2.2m wide pickup to contour the ground, the Göweil pendulum design allows it to rotate by 150mm. The pickup’s left and right wheels can effectively contour the ground with a range of movement of 150mm. This feature would certainly be appreciated on some bumpy fields in this country.

Feeding the grass from the pickup into the bale chamber is the firm’s overfeed rotor. Material is taken from the pickup over the top of the rotor, through a top-mounted knife bank and into the bale chamber.

Earlier this year, Pöttinger developed the same type of overfeeding system on its new balers. There must be a sort of common thinking among agricultural machinery designers in Austria. According to Göweil, there is no sharing of co-operation between the two Austrian firms in the design or building of their new balers.

Göweil’s mega-rotor is 570mm in diameter and is a seven-point star design. It works in conjunction with a 30-knife bank above it to produce a theoretical grass chop length of 35mm.

The overhead knife bank is accessible from the front of the baler.

One of the reasons for this, according to Göweil, is that it makes it easy to access knives when the baler is used within the firm’s G5040 combination baler-wrapper unit.

All knives are double-sided and can easily be reversed to double knife life without sharpening. The knife bank incorporates a driven feed roller to the front to assist with crop feeding into the rotor. The roller unit and knife bank is raised automatically as part of the Göweil autoflow control system for clearing blockages.

At the heart of the autoflow control system is the protection of the rotor drive and bale chamber drive. Cam clutches protect each drive system from a central gearbox.

The drive exits left and right to power the rotor and bale chamber, respectively.

Overloading the rotor with a blockage trips its cam clutch. The baler’s Profi electronic control system then automatically retracts the knives and raises the knife bank away from the rotor. Restarting the baler sees the blockage fed into the baler and knives and knife bank revert to the chopping position.

Overloading the bale chamber trips its cam clutch. The Profi control system automatically opens the tailgate by a few centimetres to allow the baler to be restarted and the baling process to continue.

Weight

Everything about this baler is heavy duty, including its weight at 5.58t. Two cam clutches, an ASA rating of 100 on the main drive chain, a triplex chain drives the rotor and its 18 rollers are all formed with 4mm thick walls.

All rollers feature twin-race self-aligning bearing on 60mm roller shafts, 65mm on drive rollers.

Another innovation from Göweil is that it has designed its new G1-F125 balers to be capable of applying either net or plastic in the tying process. To speed up either process, the G1-F125 is available with twin net/plastic units to cut the tying time in half.

The Göweil twin-application system has the potential to greatly reduce the amount of time stopped and increases the amount of time available for baling. Alternatively, to cater for different customer requirements in a contractor situation, one unit can be loaded with net and one with plastic.

Other features include twin-crop rollers on the pickup and an adjustable drawbar with the option of a hydraulically adjustable drawbar. A further option is suspension on the drawbar with the addition of nitrogen accumulators. Perhaps this should be standard Irish specification.

How much does all of this cost?

At this early stage, it is unknown if the Göweil G1-F125 will make it to Irish shores.

There is no Irish price through Lely Ireland at least. In Germany, the list price of the Göweil G1-F125 is a substantial €65,800, plus Vat. As a combination baler-wrapper machine, it is priced at €98,666, plus Vat.