MacDon How To - FD1 & FD2 FlexDraper® - Feed Auger Finger Timing

You can run your feed auger in two different positions (A or B). This adjustment can improve your crop feed, depending on your crop volume. This applies to both series of FD1 and FD2 FlexDraper®. In this video, Christian walks you through the simple process.

Finger timing? Now, you may have heard, some people say I run my auger in the “A position” or the “B position.” What that has to do with is we reposition the finger shaft, and what we can do is we can have the fingers extend a little bit earlier during the rotation cycle. And this can be advantageous again if you've got, like I said, a high-volume crop, lots of tall fluffy like canola and peas and stuff like that. And what it does is it helps grab the crop a little bit higher during the rotation to convey it underneath.

On the sides of your auger, you're going to see a white indicator with an “A.” I’ll crawl in just to make all the safety people happy. Got my boots on! You're going to see an “A Position” and a “B Position” and to adjust that you'll loosen off both of these nuts with a 24mm wrench. And then you'll rotate this to A or B. We're going to move over to our display stand and make this adjustment, and we'll show you the difference between A and B. It's just a little bit easier to see outside of the combine.

You're going to want to loosen off both of these bolts. Now you have to loosen this one off quite a bit because it actually locks in place. Here you can see the casting has a little step in it. So that has to be loosened off quite a bit. The back one doesn't need to be loosened off quite as much. Now with my wrench on the bracket here, I rotate this up to the “B Position.” Now this is a slightly older model auger, so you don't see the white indicator displayed. But what we're concerned about is the A and the B. So, we're moving this to the “A Position” which will extend our fingers a little bit earlier during the rotation. Now it's important when you're making this adjustment, you have to do it to both sides of the auger. This is absolutely critical. If you run one side in A and one side in B, you'll actually throw the timing off of the fingers and you can actually cause a some serious damage inside your auger. All right. So now that we've adjusted it, we need to torque these. We're going to torque these to 85 lb-ft or 115 Nm. And repeat on the other side.

So, the shaft stays stationary. What we've done is we've taken the shaft and we've moved it higher up. So, that means the fingers will beat full extension a little bit earlier during the rotation. In the position again fingers extend a little bit earlier. So they'll grab that crop a little bit higher. So, if it's a tall mat of crop we're grabbing it a little bit higher to get it conveyed underneath the feed auger. So again once again this is one of those things that you can try, when you're harvesting those tall, bushy crops. Once again, canola, peas, rapeseed, whatever. Even if you've got a really high volume wheat crop, this might be beneficial for you. So again, to make this adjustment, you don't need any extra parts. Just a little bit of time. And again you can experiment. Does this help convey your crop a little bit better. Or is it better in the B position. It's up to you to experiment. You might be fine 90% of the time, but that one year you get that one crop that's, better than average, or again, maybe it's lodged and it's just really feeding, in clumps and slugs and stuff like that. This is something that you can try on your own to improve your harvesting performance.