The cotton picker is an amazing invention that revolutionized the cotton industry when the first machines became available after World War II. You may have heard stories from your grandparents and other elders about spending a whole day bent over in the field just to pick half a bale of cotton, and how a single leaf meant the whole load was rejected at the gin. Today, a single six-row cotton picker is able to pick 10 acres of cotton in an hour, more than 250 hand laborers could harvest.
Over the seven decades that cotton pickers have been available, their design has advanced from one-row tractor-mounted machines to six-row self-propelled machines. But how do cotton pickers actually work? How does a cotton picker remove just the cotton fiber from cotton plants while leaving the rest of the plant in the field?
Cotton Pickers Are Complex Machines
On modern cotton pickers, the row units, called heads, start the work of picking cotton. The yellow spouts on a John Deere cotton picker pick up low-hanging branches and guide the plant into the head.
The head has two spinning drums that the cotton plant passes. Each drum is fitted with bars with steel fingers called spindles. As the drum rotates, the spindles rake the cotton plant, and barbs on the metal fingers of the spindle grab the lint and pull the cotton out of the hull.
In a John Deere cotton picker, the front drums have 16 bars with 20 spindles on each bar. The rear drums have 12 bars with 20 spindles on each bar. There are 560 spindles for each row.
The drums turn at a very high rate of speed. After the spindles grab the lint from the cotton plant, the spindles pass under a rotating urethane pad with lugs called doffers. They operate just 0.003 inch, less than 0.08 mm, away from the surface of the spindle.
The doffers spin in the opposite direction of the spindles. They knock the cotton off the spindles and throw it into a suction door. Your John Deere cotton picker has an onboard high-speed fan that blows air at high velocity through the suction doors. It generates low air pressure that carries the cotton through the air ducts and throws the cotton into the basket.
The basket of a John Deere cotton picker can hold about five bales. It holds cotton until enough cotton has been picked to load the module builder. As the basket fills, augers compact the cotton so more cotton can fit in each module.
The most modern cotton pickers have onboard module builders so the picker can discharge complete modules of cotton. The new John Deere 7760 cotton picker with an onboard module picker has a base price of $592,548. But it replaces one or two six-row tractors with a price of $300,000 to $325,000 each, a boll buggy that costs $70,000 or so, and a module builder that costs $80,000 to $100,000.
When you are running a $600,000 cotton picker, or a collection of equipment that will set you back about $800,000, you have a strong incentive to keep everything in top operational condition.
Any modern cotton picker has over 3,000 parts. Many of them are mission critical. If they wear out at the wrong time, then your cotton stays in the field. The best time to replace parts is before they fail. But how do you know when you will need replacement parts?
When It’s Time to Buy Replacement Parts
Staying on the lookout for parts problems helps you make sure that your equipment is operational when you need it most. Here are four ways to know it is time to invest in replacement parts.
- Common mechanical issues. If you have logged hundreds of thousands of hours on your cotton picker, you know when things don’t sound, feel, or smell right. Don’t wait for something to shut down your machine before you have it inspected.
- Visible wear and tear. Your John Deere cotton picker was designed to give you decades of service, but rocks in the field, collisions on the road and in the field, and exposure to inclement weather can accelerate the deterioration of parts. All it takes to prevent a serious problem is to do a visual check of parts at least once a year.
- Diminished performance. You don’t want to leave cotton in the field. When you aren’t getting all the lint from your plants into the buggy, it’s high time to check for parts problems.
- Spotty maintenance history. Every cotton picker needs to be inspected by a professional in the off season. If it hasn’t been, the best time to get your picker checked out is right now. Don’t wait to have a breakdown in the middle of your harvest.
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