Rotary Hay Rake

Overview

A rotary hay rake gathers cut and drying hay off the ground and sweeps it sideways into a clean windrow ready for a baler or forage harvester. This is a twin-rotor centre-delivery design: two rotors, fed power through the PTO Driveline and pulled by the Frame & Hitch, each sweep their share of the field inward to build one windrow down the middle. It carries no engine and rides on its own Running Gear.

The rake's job is to move the crop gently and cleanly. Hay raked too roughly shatters dry leaf and loses feed value, and tines that touch the soil rake in stones and dirt, so the geometry is built to skim just above the stubble and lift cleanly at the windrow.

How it works

Each Raking Rotor is the heart of the machine. A central head carries a ring of tine arms, and each arm is steered by a cam follower running in a fixed Cam Track. As the rotor turns, the cam rotates each arm so its spring tines drop down and rake the hay across the ground through the front of the sweep, then lift up and out of the crop as the arm reaches the windrow, leaving the gathered hay behind in a tidy row rather than carrying it round.

The working ends are the Spring Tine fingers, double-coil spring-steel tines bolted to tine bars at each arm tip. They flex over ground irregularities and snap back, and being sprung means a tine that hits an obstruction gives way instead of breaking. Tandem castoring wheels under each rotor follow ground contour and set the raking height so the tines clear the stubble.

For the road the Folding System cylinders raise and fold the rotors inward to bring transport width under three metres. A Windrow Shield curtain stops the swept hay to size the windrow consistently, and the Guards & Shields enclose the spinning PTO shaft and tines. Drive reaches the rotors through a slip clutch and central bevel gearbox in the PTO Driveline, protecting the gearing from shock loads when a rotor strikes a hidden obstacle.