New Holland 851 Baler

Baler twine tension and hay bale is too loose, the bale falls apart, how to adjust tensions.

I used my ol 851 for years, and it took a thorough understanding of how it works and everything properly adjusted to make it work well, now it's awesome. The most common adjustment needed is the apron chain tension. It's adjusted right if you measure across the 2 sprockets, top to bottom. Adjustment is done with a stop bolt and lock nut on the take up arms. On mine, it was out of adjustment so I took a link out of ea side and solved that, lots of adjustment after that. There are also coil density pins located in the rear, on ea side, thru and inspection plate, they control the tension on the cables that run up ea side and over the top. I do not have a scanner to take pages out of my owners manual. If you don't have one, get one. 70 pages of solid information, unlike newer manuals. While you're monkeying around I'd go over the bolts on ea end of the cross bars, it's time consumptive but most of the balers like this in salvage situations are there because a bar came loose on one side, at speed, and destroyed the thing. I can't get my message posted with email open, so if you've questions you can drop a note at:
[email protected] Larry
851 owners manuals on ebay

That has been my experience with the old chain New Holland balers. I know some fellows on here talk about how great they are. I think it is more they are cheap so the fellows think that is the great part. LOL When moving bales made with the old chain balers it was more of a bunch of small hay stacks than good hard bales. Hated trying to haul them on the semi step deck trailer.

Run slower might help make the bale a little tighter but those balers don?t wrap the twine very tight

Oldproudvet gave some great advice.I'll add to make a good bale you need to run slow ground speed and high PTO RPM plus rake the up the largest windrow you can straddle with your tractor then don't skimp on the amount of twine on the bale.Plus If you use some type cutter that chops the hay up all to pieces like straw the baler won't do as good of a job.

Being cheap is a good part of using them these days but they are cheap because of ignorance (stupidity?) of the operators not because they won't work well.Old AC Roto Balers were the same way
we made thousands of bales with a couple of those for years made great bales but the operator had to understand how the baler worked and operate it correctly.Every machine I have
ever operated had its quirks that needed to be figured out when using it.

Those chain balers put so much hay back on the ground made buying a new belt baler cheap. Just the floor chains ripping it out, always had a pile of chaff behind the baler when done putting twine on.

Yea it depends on the hay but that chaff isn't really the greatest feed in the world either.I think though since I have bought several good chain balers for $500 or less while some of my farmer friends have paid $25,000+ for their balers I can afford to loose a little hay(LOL).Plus I can pull the balers with my $2000 Oliver 1550 tractors and don't need to buy a $70,000 tractor to bale with I figure I'm ahead in the long run.Fuel savings alone more than pay for the lost hay chaff.

thank you so much for your help-

I?d love to have my first 851 back it would bale anything and had the smaller tubes in so you could actually work with the chain . Once I finally put a piece of expanded metal in the front so the hay that wouldn?t rip the time out of the twine arms every 10 feet it wasn?t to bad

I also found that high rpm's on the PTO and a little slower speed makes a much better bale. They will bale really fast, but the less wraps of hay you get the looser the bale is.

The looser bale will also breath a little so they are a smidge more forgiving on getting the hay perfectly dry.

The 851 is a round loaf stacker at best if you need to handle them more than just off the field and back out the cows