Test Stand for Vacuum meters



What's here? For Spring 2017,I switched from an 8 row JD 7000 finger meter planter to a 12 row JD 7200 vacuum planter. While the singulation was better than my old planter, I was not satisfied with the seed spacing. I had previously built a test stand for the finger meters so I built a second stand for testing vac meters.

Proposed tests:

- Test to determine how well can my Eset vac meters perform: Singulation. Seed spacing. Speed of planting.
- How does the vacuum affect performance?
- How does population and planter speed affect performance?
- How does seed size and shape affect performance?

The test stand




A shop vac supplied the vacuum. To adjust vacuum, I loosened the duct tape at the shop vac.
I torched off much of the row unit leaving the mount for a seed tube.
I welded a mount for a gear motor and added the drive chain. 		View from the front of the row unit.

The vac setup
The seed sensor connects to my bluetooth control box.



An improved app to test seed spacing



The results:

Click here for Test Stand Results Spreadsheet

How well did my Eset vac meters perform:
Singulation: With sufficient vacuum, the E-Set would singulate at 99+% at 32000 seeds per acre and 5 mph. Changing the planting population to 47,000 seeds/acre the meter would singulate at 98.8%. Vacuum needed to be at 15 or higher for the E-Sets to perform well. It ran fine at the maximum vaccum I could get.
Performance dropped off slightly at populations of 40,000 and higher. 98.8% singulation at 47,700 sps.
One test of speed at 5.5 mph dropped singulation to an average of 99.6% and increased seeds spaced more than 1" from perfect to 8%.
Two tests of speed at 6 mph dropped singulation to 99.5% and increased seeds spaced more than 1" from perfect to 7%.
Larger seed or flats dropped singulation and worsened seed spacing. I saw singulation ranging from 93.6% to 97.1% on large seeds.
The large flat seeds had around 9% of the seeds spaced more than 1" from perfect compared to about 5% on medium round.
One variety of medium flat seeds singulated at an aveage of 98.2%. Another averaged 99.0%. The medium round seeds averaged 7.3% of the seeds spaced more than 1" from perfect.
The medium flat seeds averraged 7.6% of the seeds spaced more than 1" from perfect.
A small sample of Large seeds averaged 9%.
© Out Farming 2018