Ford baler

Most folks said to stay away from the Ford baler. There are several for sale within 100 miles. Most are $500-600. They all say they work good. What are the issues with them. The MF I was asking about sold.

I had a 532. It made really nice bales, tied perfectly. The slip clutch and overrunning clutch were kind of wimpy. I liked it better than the 275 New Holland I have now. I also had a MF 12, I never could get it to tie correctly.

The main thing is parts availability. There are none. That baler was made by New Idea in the 70s.Other than that they were good balers.My brother inlaw has 3(one 530 wire;one 542 wire;one 542 twine) in the junk because of no parts availability.

I think they were made by Long, or at least there was a Long baler that was identical. It's probably been more than 10 years since I had to get parts for one, there was some available then. I'm sure that situation hasn't improved. They might work for just a couple hundred bales a year. I don't think they deserve the bad reputation they have. There used to be several around here. Ford was pretty big in the Southeast, he should buy two of them!

Again it is parts or lack there of. Buy one and have something break and you now have a extra large paper weight because you cannot get the part to fix it

We had a Ford 530 think was the model number bale length and density changed as the hay changed.We then bought a JD 24T great baler.

Maybe you could buy 2 ? A ford baler would be mighty swanky behind one of your ford tractors 🚜

I agree with the others on parts. You might need a spare. They did not sell well around me. Deere. New holland and ih are probably in the top far as older bailers go. Case cockshutt and moline bailers all suffer from the same issue. Not that they were bad in their day. A baler is one item you do not need issues with when a field of hay is down.

(quoted from post at 00:21:10 07/13/19) We had a Ford 530 think was the model number bale length and density changed as the hay changed.We then bought a JD 24T great baler.

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TF, I had a Ford 250 for a few years. It had adjustments for both length and density, as does my MF. My hay ground tends to have huge differences in moisture within just 100 yards. This translates into great differences in windrow size and thus density. For awhile I was looking for a remote tension adjuster to put on my MF but none came up.

My Oliver 62T baler has some sort of hydraulic gizmo like a hydraulic jack that adjusts the tension on the bales,it pumps as the bales go thru the chamber.Don't understand exactly how it works but that baler makes exactly the same bale every time regardless of the hay going in the baler.

We had a pair of 532's new from our dealership, same with 535 mower conditioner (New Idea 290 in ford colors ) and would agree with what most say about them. There must have been a lot of them made as I have seen a few here as of late and even saw a set of needles for sale recently. We did 3000 bales a year then and it's not to say there was no downtime, but once in good repair it was a great small capacity baler. The issue with parts would concern me. I would not want to steer you away from some small scale baling small squares, I always enjoyed the work on a small scale. About 2 years after my long time friend and farmer passed, all of his equipment went up for sale, kind of regret not going for his well kept NH 315, went for 3K, and though he did bale a fair amount with it in the time he had it, it was a clean one owner, low useage baler when he got it. I baled hay I bought from him for our horses with it, it did a great job. Me and his son put up 600 bales in no time one Saturday afternoon, a heavy 1st cut field that I tedded and raked into very nice, thick and uniform windrows. When we had the 532's, our back up was an old trade in, of all balers for back up an IH 45 !!!! -- still have it, rusted to heck, hard to believe I can remember putting up hay with it, and it was a rarity, darned thing actually worked right !!!! I had to ask my father, as I recall balers were always trouble and it was old and rusty looking then, (70's) but we did use it when one of the 532's was down or used at another farm.

The thrower on the one 532 became problematic, we took it off, went with a chute instead. I can recall the 532's doing quite a bit without much trouble just the same, but that was after a friend who was a really at working on these looked after them. I can recall my father wanting to shoot the darned thing and put it out of it's misery one day ! LOL . Hit or miss with all of these sometimes.

Farmer friend had a IH 440 I believe, well definitely IH and he put so many bales through it, that he wore through the bale chamber eventually. I think he did upward of 20K in bales in those days, always pairs of wagons going by, he filled our older barn with a huge mow and his dairy barn mow, + another building. Hay was a big thing around here for a long time, nothing like it was then today.