Martin Seggering about “25 years BiG Pack” - A story to marvel and smile
When Martin Seggering visits the Krone museum at Spelle, he always makes a point of calling in on the old BiG Pack.
If you want to know more about the fascinating history of the BiG Pack, just talk to Martin Seggering. The agricultural engineer has seen the big baler develop from the design stage to working the fields, and he has been instrumental in establishing the machine on worldwide markets. The MultiBale system, which was introduced in 2003, was a major coup for Krone. Up until today, the BiG Pack is the only machine that is able to tie up several small wads into one big bale. Martin Seggering: “In the run-up to Agritechnica, we premiered this ingenious invention at a demonstration before invited customers and the agri press. Yet there was this malfunction: the electronic system on the prototype machine was not ready yet, so we couldn’t operate the knotters electronically, but it was possible to trigger it by pressing a button on the control box. This operated the system manually. So I instructed the operator to fend off everybody wanting to enter the tractor cab and simply drive off, pressing that button at every third stroke of the plunger. I told him to carry on until four of five packs were done, so that the spectators would see the baler was able to make multibales. They seemed unaware of our problem and saw that the BiG Pack was indeed producing multibales. A few days later the electronic system was up and running, and multibaling became an automated process.”
The massive flywheel on the first BiG Pack generation already made for very quiet running on these models.
Another conspicuous BiG Pack feature was its huge flywheel with an immense inertia that absorbed the violent backstroke of the powerful plunger. “To show at the demonstrations that the baler ran much quieter and had a relatively low input requirement, we usually hitched it to tractors of approximately 100hp,” explains Martin. “This spared us a huge embarrassment at one machine demonstration in Poland. Shortly before the demo started, the pivoting drawbar on the tractor came off and we instantly had to come up with a makeshift solution. Using ropes and wire, we managed to attach the BiG Pack to the tractor, and the driver was told to straddle the swath and drive very carefully without any major steering movements and then stop before reaching the headland. Under no circumstance was he to make the turn. It brought the sweat to our brows, but it worked. The baler didn’t come off the tractor, and nobody noticed the embarrassing mishap. This success was mainly the achievement of the massive flywheel and its immense shock absorbing capacity.” The machine freak adds with a chuckle: “No other baler on the market would have been able to go through something like this.”
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