No doubting HARDI leadership in the broadacre market. The COMMANDER TerraForce is a great looking product and if size matters, you won’t be disappointed.
We were told HARDI will deliver more than fifty COMMANDER TerraForce sprayers on order for this cropping season and another 50 before the end of the year which is testament to its early recognition.
Witnessing the first COMMANDER TerraForce roll out of HARDI assembly, it was jubilation and all systems go after a long two years and many hundreds of man hours.
The TerraForce boom is one of the most important and ambitious developments for HARDI Australia in recent years which introduces four new working widths of 36, 38, 40 and 42m. Three new COMMANDER trailers were also developed to carry the bigger TerraForce boom now offering capacities 6500, 8500 and 10000 litres.
The COMMANDER TerraForce paddock test was like watching a glider effortlessly float across the ground. The bigger these booms get the better they seem to go. All the cornering and the headland stop starts were soaked up by the strength of the boom design and the smart engineering in the centre.
The centre is not the traditional HARDI trapeze as most of us would know it. Instead it uses a new pendulum design to provide freer movement between the boom and the trailer. It incorporates dynamic stability control, a first for HARDI which means you can choose how free the movement should be on-the-go to suit the spraying conditions.
Headland cornering and auto steering creates boom motion referred to as yaw movement. For a boom structure like the TerraForce these yaw forces can be enormous and have to be absorbed to safeguard the boom. HARDI have done this in a unique way by incorporating a yaw damped parallelogram system which is linked to the fold cylinders. It uses nitrogen accumulated hydraulics and dampers to absorb the energy created by the yaw movement and It works incredibly well.
Some auto steering systems are aggressive getting on line and then there can be continued correction down the line which transfers yaw movement to the boom. This can be felt in the tractor seat and if not arrested can damage the boom.
Smooth paddocks exist but there are always surprises for one reason or another. Protecting the boom from a sudden shock caused by a wheel falling in a hole or going over a bump has been well thought out using independent wing suspension. The boom wing is supported by tilt cylinders through a linkage system and suspension element to absorb the shock transfer. Works nice!
The all new boom plumbing is very tidy as well. The major changes include bigger boom tubes and new saddles to cope with the demand for increasing application rates. The way the feed tubes are mounted use clamps instead of cable ties. The nozzles are protected behind the front cord of the boom and the positioning of the two rear cords taking advantage of the aero dynamics in the structure to minimise turbulence.
‘It takes a long time to develop a new product and nobody knows this better than HARDI’ said Graeme Johnson CEO of HARDI Australia. ‘There are a lot of steps in the process from need to concept, engineering, prototyping, testing and production and the investment is enormous. To maintain our leadership we put ourselves on the line sometimes but it’s worth it.’
The new COMMANDER trailers allow farmers to choose small tank big booms or big tank small boom combination.
‘A 6500 with 42m may not be common but it is desirable for farmers dealing with smaller horsepower tractors and wanting wider booms’ Graeme explained.’ No doubt the new 8500 COMMANDER will be the most popular if the existing orders are any indication’.