Rotobaler Questions

Yup, I believe so, but I've only seen one once, and that was on a baler sitting in a fencerow. They had an electric overdrive that would kick it into warp speed when the twine arm dropped. My understanding was that some of the (many) problems with the continuous functionality/bakcfeed conveyor of the #10's was when the high speed tie didn't kick in: Didn't tie fast enough and while it was wrapping, hay kept accumulating and built up too much backlog ahead of the pickup.

Of course, there were many other issues with the #10's continuous baling functionality - that was only one small part of it. The ones I've seen had to maintain  a pretty slow ground speed, or the upper bypass conveyor would backfeed and drop too much hay in front of the pickup and would start rolling hay into a ball right in the pickup where it was dropping. It was a pretty wacky idea to begin with: The baler was designed to be fed at a certain rate, and suddenly during the bypass period you're feeding twice as much for a short period once the bale ejects. So you either have to maintain a slow enough ground speed to handle twice the feed rate, even though you're only handling it for a small portion of the time and the rest of the time you're not using the baler to its full pickup potential. Or you travel at a decent speed to use the baler's normal pickup capacity, then it gets over-crowded when it does its bypass thing and starts balling up in the pickup.

I think Allis had some of the best engineering in its time, but for that particular instance someone didn't know how to design for steady-state operation.