Bought a 4 row steel head

[Jim Meade / Iowa City]

I have an 8 row steel head on my TR96.  Last season, I had to rebuilt two row units at a price of about $2000.  Enough of that, I said, so I bought a 4 row head with the newer row units for $500.  I can change them out myself if I need to.  If a row unit goes bad, I've paid for the unit.  I can strip the row units off and sell the rest for steel to get it off the place if I want to.

The newer plastic heads are going to be at least $10,000 and go up pretty fast.  At my age and farm size, I didn't feel that was money well spent so I'll cripple along with the older stuff. 

[siloguy]

Good move. We have bought stuff at auctions before with the intent of using it for parts. Probably the best deal we got was at least 20 years ago when we bought a tired new idea corn picker for $50. Back then we were running a corn picker to pick surplus corn and it was getting expensive to keep the old machine going. We ended up using a couple gearboxes and snapping rolls from the $50 donor along with a wheel spindle and I even helped our a neighbor who needed a few parts. After we quit using pickers, we scrapped it and I think by then, the scrap value alone exceeded what we paid and I bet the parts we got off it exceeded $1000.