Near Intersection of I-35 & I-90 Southern Mn. | Here's our experience for what it's worth. We run an older Deere 1770NT with ground drive (Yes, ground drive). It was purchased used and had the double spring arrangement from Deere for down force. It came from out of the area and had apparently been used in a No-till situation.
The double spring assemblies allowed use to manually set the spring tension from no added tension to three other settings as I recall. We added row mounted row cleaners to each row, this added a fair amount of weight. We are very conventional tillage. My thought at the time was "How much added down force do we need?".
We did not know how much down force we had due to the combination of the planting unit and the row cleaners.
Since we were using an Ag Leader 1200 for seed section control and population, monitoring our starter fertilizer and controlling a spray system, I found a used Ag Leader ISO module for monitoring and controlling the down force. This was added to the InCommand and we are able to view the down force on those 6 rows through an ISO screen.
We installed the weigh bars on 6 of the 24 rows. Since the planter still had the Deere spring assemblies, we only used the monitoring portion of the down force module's capabilities. We were then able to observe the down force. The idea was we could make manual adjustments based on those observations.
We came to the conclusion that with our situation we needed UP force possibly more often than DOWN force. To this end we purchased an UP force air bag kit for each row. These kits assume that you already have the air bag downforce hardware and add the parts from the kit to it. We did not have the air bag down force bags but our seed dealer had lots of them since other customers had abandoned them. We removed the Deere spring assemblies and attached the used air bag DOWN force assemblies and the newly purchased but never used UP force assemblies. These UP/DOWN force air bags require an air source and an air controller. I was able to purchase a homemade air controller through the classifieds here.
At the same time we changed the row cleaners from the fixed height style to an air cylinder style that could be manually controlled from the cab. We used a Clean Sweep air controller in the cab for this. This means we have two air controllers in the cab. One air compressor easily handles both systems and is mounted on the hitch of the planter.
That was the system we used last year and plan on using it again. Some will likely scoff at the idea since the UP/DOWN force is manual and is not adjusted hundreds of times per second. Although this is certainly not cutting edge, it gives us more options than we had before.
Edited by tedbear 3/16/2024 06:02
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AgLeader Sureforce question
