3PL Sprayers - The Benefits
3PL sprayers are extremely popular up North but relatively uncommon in our area. For whatever reason, they haven't taken off down here maybe it's because everyone is so used to trailing sprayers, or because of a misconception that 3PL sprayers are small capacity only. Whatever the reasons we believe these sprayers warrant investigating if you are in the market for a new spray-rig.
We have recently sold a few 3PL in our area and have been very impressed with them. Linkage sprayers make up a large percentage of the machines that Hayes Spraying manufacture each year, and we see a lot of benefits including:
· Large capacity - depending on tractor size you can put up to a 2000lt front tank and a 2000lt rear tank with hydraulic fold booms up to 30m.
· Valve for money - the cost is much less than a trailed sprayer.
· Versatility - a front tank set up means you can use it for other things such as spraying trace-elements while sowing, or setting up a boom on your seeder for spraying Treflan etc. or even use it as a firefighter.
· One set of wheel tracks for your in-crop spraying and less ground compaction than pulling a trailer.
· Can handle the wet better - we all know how wet is gets down here (yeah right!) again, not dragging a trailer.
· Basically turn your tractor into a self-propelled sprayer.
The pictures to the right were taken whilst setting up a Hayes 3PL with a 1200lt front mount tank and 16m boom at Andrew Dalglish's at 'Bradford Park' Eurongilly a few months ago.
The set-up on your tractor is very straight-forward with Hayes having a bolt-on chassis for the front mount tank for the majority of tractors. The complete unit can be easily fitted in a day. Andrew's took a little longer as for that particular model tractor the chassis had to be built on-site to fit the tractor and isn't pre-fabricated. The hydraulically driven hypro pump , controls and filters etc are mounted on the front-tank unit so other spraying tasks (such as ones mentioned above) can be performed without the boom on the 3PL.
