Warakirri - 48m SOLD
The biggest boom in Australia has left our yard and has made its home at Warakirri 'Mukoora', Ardlethan. Stephen and Evan first came to look at the sprayer at our Ganmain Demo Day back in September, and then ordered the sprayer in December.
While the vital statistics are impressive enough-8000lt, 48m boom, hydraulic lift, individual hydraulic inner and outer fold, individual hydraulic wing tilt, 784 lt/min hydraulic Hypro stainless steel pump, bogie axle with independent coil spring suspension, mudguards, tank flushing nozzles, induction hopper etc. Stephen chose to option up the sprayer further with the fitment of options including brakes, twin boom lines each with 8 sections (16 sections in total), automatic boom section control, electric end jets and to top it all off a Topcon X20 looking after everything - this one console does the lot -hydraulic auto-steer, spray rate control, automatic section control and switching the twin lines on/off. Stephen is also considering adding a weather station which gives you live updates and logs weather conditions as you spray.
Its hard to describe un-folding and spraying with this machine for the first time due to the sheer size of it, 'daunting' and 'intimidating' are two words that spring to mind. Stephen put Evan in the drivers seat first up, and at double the width of their previous sprayer the shock of it actually turned his hair white. While we were testing the sprayer, at a speed of only 15 km/hr we were covering around 180 acres an hour!
It was certainly a big job re-plumbing the boom and adding the twin-lines, that process alone took a couple of days and we used around 300m of hose to plumb the 16 sections and a further 100m of 1/2" nylon tube to plumb the nozzles bodies. The job of putting 200 nozzles on a sprayer also took some time and it is certainly a hell of a lot bigger job than we were used to dealing with!
Stephen has also got a new tractor to put in front of the sprayer-the big JCB Fastrac 8250 is an extremely comfortable place to spend a few hours and will be a perfect match for the huge Hayes sprayer, making a very impressive rig.
The variable transmission in the JCB is excellent and ultra-simple to operate (even though it took me around 20 minutes to get the thing moving the first time I jumped in it!) Road speed and comfort is unreal-on the trip out to Ardlethan I was sitting on a very comfortable 65 km/hr pulling the 8000lt Sprayer and it was doing it easy. The heated seat will also be quite nice in winter-after the first couple of minutes sitting in the tractor I panicked and thought I was sitting on an electrical fire!
Although this machine dwarfs all others, in typical Hayes fashion it is very easy to operate and built strong. We're sure it will be a very reliable machine that will spray many thousands of acres in the coming years.
It was interesting talking to John from Hayes when he was down about the development and progress of the 48m booms. Hayes had built plenty of 36m booms, but when they were approached to build a 48m boom they were a little hesitant as going out to 48m was in a whole new league. When they bit the bullet and decided to build the 48m they kept their standard boom design and just scaled it up. That first unit has now been out in the field for nearly 3 years and has sprayed nearly 300,000 acres without a single crack or failing of the boom, which says a lot about the booms. I'd like to see some of the other manufacturers try that! It is truly a testament to the design and strength of the Hayes boom.
We are very excited to be part of this spray rig and look forward to following its progress out at Mukoora.
This article was written March 2008.
