SIMON Schinckel reflects on winning the Machine of the Year at the 55th Henty Machinery Field Days with a pearl of wisdom: “It’s always the easiest idea that’s the hardest to come up with isn’t it?”
The machine, a 16-wheel hay rake, has proved his company’s most popular, so he poured a couple of years into honing it into something better than he began with.
“Not everyone needs a $70,000 rake,” he says, “which is why we’ve gone to work on this model to make it easier, and safer, to use. People are getting older, and often people unfamiliar with such equipment are helping.
“We do have rakes that are purely controlled by hydraulics, but they cost a lot of money. This size is the most popular and we keep them in stock all of the time,” he said.
The end result of Mr Schinckel’s pondering and tinkering is a rake with spring-loaded adjustments meaning there aren’t loose pins that can be lost during harvest.
The rake, which retails in the “mid $30,000s”, is manually adjusted, or can be pre-set to the preferred width in a one-person operation and then adjusts itself as it is hauled forward by the tractor.
It can operate from a width of 2.1 metres per side to 4.5m. Mr Schmickel has been manufacturing rakes since 1992.
He started out building stock crates, but sold that business off to Duncan Stock Crates, out of Forbes.
Since then he’s concentrated solely on rakes.
He’s done pretty well, he has 1400 rakes out in the field now.