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old Gehl baler

6.2K views 9 replies 6 participants last post by  luke strawwalker  
#1 ·
Hello,

i am new in this forum, and i hope you will excuse my bad english. My name is christoph and my wife and i are living on ouer very little farm (also for german standarts) nearly in the mittle of germany. Now 25 jears are gone since we bought an old Gehl baler. I think its one of the first, maybe it is built in 1974 or 5.As i knew Gehl never directly sold agricultural equipment directly in germany, but a workshop for agricultural mashinery imported them in that time. We are always happy with this machine and hopeful, we get old together.



Baling in very dry and brittle conditions.

The clip is a bit shaky, but i think, after a few hours on the tractor, you don´t realize it anymore. ;-)

Christoph
 
#2 ·
Welcome to Haytalk Christoph. I also have some Gehl hay equipment and am pleased with every machine I have.

You have beautiful country and the hay looks like it was very thick.

Welcome again, Mark
 
#4 ·
Hello,

thank You for Your friendly welcome.

Thick swaths makes the bale start easier. Also, it was a significant improvement, when I replaced the slick belts with profiled ones. I am hopeful, that sometimes i also will built Gathering wheels at the pick up. In Germany they are almost unknown.

Until I bought the baler, I never ever heard someting about Gehl, and didn´t know where to buy spare parts. But after a look on the machine, I thought, whit a little improvisation, you can always make him run again. And so it is. The only disadvantage is the non metric system ...

Christoph
 
#5 ·
In time,you will get used to the SAE hardware.I sure it's a challenge just as the metric has been for us but you soon find out that most bolts on a machine take one of three wrenches.On New Holland,most are 1/2,9/16 or 3/4 inch sizes.If it looks like a 19 to you,it's probably 3/4. 1/2 will look like a smaller 13 and 9/16 will look similar to a heavy 14mm.Sciencemadesimple.com has a good conversion calculator.
 
#6 ·
That's a slightly older model but almost identical to my Ford 552, which was built by Gehl as their model 1400... the main difference is the 552/Gehl 1400 use six 6 inch wide by 466 inch long belts, instead of the nine 4 inch belts used on your baler...

They're getting harder to get parts for all the time. Gehl used to be a fairly good size player in the hay machinery market, but they just up and decided to quit building ag machinery altogether about 8-10 years ago now I think... They chose to focus on their industrial machinery like ditchers and boring machines and stuff like that. Don't know if they're even making skid loaders anymore. Shame because there was a dealer here near Lockhart, Texas that was selling brand new Gehl balers, mowers, and he still has a brand new wheel rake sitting on his lot that he can't seem to get rid of-- probably because nobody wants to have to scare up parts for them and because the resale value would be nonexistent... There were a LOT of farmers who were pretty upset when Gehl up and quit the business-- some had just bought new Gehl balers and watched their resale value drop precipitously when the company decided to exit the business...

I've got some YouTube videos on my channel, "luke strawwalker" baling hay with the 552, and some repair videos as well. I built my own gathering wheels a number of years ago for mine as balers that old didn't have them, they didn't come along until probably 3-5 years after we bought the baler. My grandpa bought that baler in around '78-80 time frame brand new from the local Ford dealer... we were basically one of the first in the county to switch to round baling from small square bales, which he and Dad had done for decades. Thing was, Grandpa was getting older, and back in the 50's, 60's, and 70's, you could go to town and find someone willing to come pick up hay bales and stack them in the barn for "day labor" wages pretty easy-- by the 80's it was getting harder all the time to well nearly impossible-- nobody wanted to do that hot, dirty work stacking hay for a few bucks! When we got imported red fire ants infesting our area in the early-mid 70's that were introduced accidentally from South America, they soon eliminated all the non-stinging native ant species and replaced them, and they got REALLY bad there for about 10-15 years before they've finally "settled down" into a new more balanced ecosystem-- oh, they're still around, just not QUITE as bad! They used to crawl all over freshly baled hay bales left on the meadow to cure for a day or two, and by the time you picked up a small square bale off the field and set it up on the trailer, you had ants halfway to your elbows that you had to sweep off before too many of them started stinging you. That REALLY killed getting help on the farm to stack hay! SO, Grandpa decided to buy the big round baler and start rolling his hay-- our old barn was getting VERY old and rather decrepit, and upkeep costs were going up, and round bales didn't need to be picked up off the field and stacked in the barn and then restacked on a trailer and hauled out to feed in winter, round bales could be stacked outside in rows with a tractor and then loaded by tractor onto a trailer in winter to haul to the other farm to feed, so it basically made making hay a one-man operation... I cut, raked, baled, and stacked more hay in 4 days by myself than Grandpa and Grandma and Dad and a hired crew could have done in a week before...

Any other questions, just ask! OL J R :)
 
#9 ·
Hello Luke,

thanks for your reply.
of course I know your videos with the ford baler ;-)
In the course of time, I have replaced some ball bearings ...
Since inch ball bearings are not common here, I have a whole range in stock. So we can always help ourself.
We owned the first round baler in our village. It became more and more difficult to find people to pick up and the storage space was limited. We built a simple triangular hut in the field to store about 100 bales.

Christoph
 
#10 ·
Hello Luke,

thanks for your reply.
of course I know your videos with the ford baler ;-)
In the course of time, I have replaced some ball bearings ...
Since inch ball bearings are not common here, I have a whole range in stock. So we can always help ourself.
We owned the first round baler in our village. It became more and more difficult to find people to pick up and the storage space was limited. We built a simple triangular hut in the field to store about 100 bales.

Christoph
Great!

Yeah, same for us... we were one of the first in the area to have a round baler, due to difficulty finding help to stack small squares and the influx of imported red fire ants from South America, which would infest the bales for a few days right after they were baled, and which would climb on your hands and arms and sting you picking up small squares...

We just store round bales outside, which can be challenging in our hot, humid, wet climate, but we've found putting them up on a pair of old utility poles or plastic pallets to create an air gap to isolate them from the clay ground underneath and prevent or minimize moisture wicking up from below really solves about 3/4 or more of the outdoor storage losses...

Later! OL J R :)