Rotobaler questions

I can only assume that someone wanted a more positive feeding system for baling some more stemmy material or something else that wouldn't feed into the baler well?

Im guessing that more than one was built judging by the work and design that went into it but so far this is the only one I have seen.  

Jim

Without putting twine on would you still have to stop to eject the bale. As the comment about hand pitching straw in without stopping got my wheels turning.  

I meant to respond to this earlier: I took that picture from another forum. It was the only one. But the poster on that other forum appears to have taken it from a 1963 'Nance Farm Equipment' catalog. Nance was a distributor for a few manufacturers. No other pictures than that one, unfortunately. A former coworker's father had both a #10 and Kelly Ryan version (briefly, as neither one worked well). Him and I talked about it a few times.

For someone who's really keen on rotobalers (don't know why you would be, but that's just me being me) you might try contacting the Kelly Ryan company and seeing what info they can dredge up. They still make manure spreaders and silage equipment in Nebraska. Who knows, if their engineering department is like ones I've worked for, they might still have the original drawings/details buried in a drawer somewhere and be happy to send them to someone for interest's sake. You could even have one made for not too much money if you put the CAD work in yourself: There's not a lot to that system that a decent fab shop with a plasma table, brake-press, and basic machining couldn't make in a few hours.

Looking at the OP's pic, I'm thinking more and more it might have been a similar adaptation to make for continuous baling: It has the spreader bars sticking down to meter out hay and block it from piling into the chamber during the tying cycle. The pickup reel appears to be driven from the same countershaft as the Kelly Ryan one - making it so that it will keep picking up and piling onto the apron during the tie cycle. It all depends on whether the feeder forks stop when the tying cycle starts - we'd have to see a little more of that mechanism to know for sure. If the feeder forks stop when the tying cycle starts but the pickup reel keeps picking up, it's almost certainly an adaptation to try and make for continuous baling:

- Tying cycle starts, feeder forks stop, but pickup reel keeps picking up and piling into the feeder forks.

- When tying is complete, feeder forks start moving the accumulated slug of hay into the chamber, with those upright bars metering the hay out so it goes into the chamber (somewhat) uniformly.

Or at least, that would have maybe been the theory. Like the #10 and the Kelly-Ryan version, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have worked well unless you had a smaller windrow and dialed back your ground speed. And then (just like the #10's) your limiting factor for bales per hour would be the smaller windrow/slower ground speed, so you're one step ahead and one step back. And (like the #10's), because it varies between very light feed during normal operation and very heavy feed when the recirc slug makes its way into the chamber, it'll be very hard to make consistent, controllable, predictable bales and keep the adjustments correct. Because (as Dr. P. notes above), to work best, you want to maximize the feed into these balers. So you're actually one step ahead and two steps back. To come close to working well, I suspect you'd need the electric gearbox switching option that the later rotobalers had, which kicked the tying cycle into hyperdrive. My understanding from that coworker whose father had a #10 was that when the #10's were set up well with a small windrow and the electric gearbox switch was working properly, they could 'almost' do an ok job of continuous baling. If you held your tongue just right.