John Deere Presents 494 and 495 Corn Planters

I did not think the filmstrip for this one was going to make it. The canister it is in is rusty & beat up & the film leaders were very scratched. That's one good thing about the film leader in this instance. It saves the film from damage. The record was questionable until cleaned. Turned out to be better than a couple that didn't initially show any issues.
Otherwise, this is a very neat video about the x9x series planters. Would like to have the hopper gauge setup on my McCormick. Would be easier to see, too, as the seed cans are in front of the fert hoppers.
Hope you enjoy!
Regards!!

[@kswaynes7569]

Had a 494 and bought an 894 but was most impressed with using #71 unit planters on a tool bar. Scott's Small Engines and Farming had videos of using his last Spring for corn and soybeans. In Michigan, you could never find dry fertilizer hoppers without rusted out bottoms, I had the "brilliant" idea that fiberglass hoppers would be a big seller, I had molds made and a dozen hoppers made but never sold a one! Most farmers had already dumped their 494 style planters and had went to the 7000 series planters with plastic molded fertilizer hoppers.

[@lukestrawwalker]

I had a 71 Flexi... individual unit planters just like my old #18 Deere planter from the late 50's or early 60's... to change population you had to change sprockets on EVERY ROW UNIT. Double disk openers, but horizontal plate-bottom metering, driven by a press wheel behind the openers that drove the plate and controlled the planting depth, though a foot or two behind the plates. It was a pretty lousy planter in our sticky clay gumbo soils. I got it cheap and ran it a couple seasons or so until I could find an affordable used 7100 3-point mounted planter, which I picked up and then refurbished. I swapped the horizontal plate-bottom hoppers and drives on it (it was set up with plate bottom hoppers with domed plates for planting peanuts) with plateless vertical drives for finger pickups, and plateless hoppers for finger pickups, which are all 'off the shelf' parts. Then for planting cotton, grain sorghum, and soybeans, I installed a set of used Kinze brush meters I bought, which attach to the Deere hoppers identically to how the finger pickup meters install, and are directly interchangeable with them. Swap in the appropriate seed disk, tighten two thumb screws, and install the hopper on the planter unit panel and unlatch the spring loaded drive coupler to the meter, set the population on the central planting rate transmission, set the row unit depth stops, and you're ready to dump seed in and go plant. The Kinze meters will meter out seed just like a sewing machine-- I'd put them up against any complicated air or vacuum planter setup in cotton, sorghum, or beans any day... Whatever you set it to, that's what you'd get, all day every day, one and done. Set it and forget it, unlike air and vac planters which are always having some issue with the air pressure or seeding population, door seals on the meters, singulator cups or brushes or whatever, etc. Too much to keep track of and go wrong, particularly for crops that just aren't that sensitive to planting population or spacing accuracy, which is basically everything but corn. Finger pickups can plant corn accurately enough if they're maintained, set up, and operated correctly as well. The manufacturers love the air and vac planters because of all the upkeep and parts required to keep them planting correctly.
If you run a 71 Flexi and run a 7000 or 7100 Deere, it's literally night and day. The 7000 beats them all to pieces. The best thing about the 71 Flexi's is you can set them up for different row spacings much easier-- loosen four bolts slide them across the bar to the row spacing you want, and tighten them down... if you want to do double row planting or narrow row beans, you can set up a Flexi to do that pretty easy. Later! OL J R :)

[@benhall2146]

And I think the talk about high speed planting is a recent thing!

[@lukestrawwalker]

Yep very interesting... everything old is new again. Basically the same setup as the modern "high speed" 10 mph planters, only they use a seed brush belt instead of a chain with paddles.
The hill drop stuff is pretty interesting. I guess that was still a thing in the Midwest back then-- by the 60's in south Texas we were drill planting everything, including corn. Just single seeds played out down the row. I've got a number 18 Deere planter from about this same time era-- they were a "blackland" style planter with the gauge wheel up front, followed by a "buzzard wing" triangular sweep that shaved the top couple inches or so of the bed off the top of the row, followed by a "mini-sword" opener behind it, and a pair of offset covering shovels running about 3-4 inches off either side of the seed furrow, to overlap the furrow with a couple inches of loose, moist soil. The bad thing about these planters were they practically left the field level after planting, as they pretty much knocked down the beds, and of course ripping the ground wide open with a sweep, sword, and two shovels meant most of your moisture was gone in short order. Plus, in our sticky black clay, we had to make a second pass with a pair of rollers about an hour or two after planting, to roll the rows down and firm up the soil around the seed. You couldn't just pull the rollers behind the planter-- you HAD to give it that couple hours (on an average sunny breezy day) to dry out the surface of the soil enough that it wouldn't stick to the rollers. On a dreary day you might plant half the day and roll the second half. We sprayed pre-emerge bands at the same time we rolled the field, so if you got a rain after you had half a field planted but before you rolled it, and then got repeated rains over the next few days that knocked you out of the field a week, the crop would be up on those acres, but they didn't get the pre-emerge weed control, then you really had a mess to deal with. Thank goodness they developed the Deere 7000 series planters, they pretty much made all these old sword opener and press wheel planters obsolete. Plates stuck around though, and I have a whole collection of Deere plates for my planters. I picked up a 7100 (3 point mounted version of the 7000 pull type) years ago when I was still row cropping, it was still equipped with plate bottom hoppers and drives because it was set up with peanut dome plates (which were interchangeable with flame delinted cottonseed bottoms which were another specialty plate unit, and the regular plate type bottoms for drill (row) planting corn, sorghum, soybeans, sugarbeets, acid-delinted cottonseed, and just about every other crop you can imagine. I got some 7000 drive sprockets and swapped the plated drives out by removing them from the top of the shank, and installing the plateless drives on the side panels (all the holes were already there, so it was basically removing and reinstalling two bolts on each) and then got some second-hand plateless hoppers from a used equipment dealer, and bought some second-hand Kinze brush meters, which will bolt directly onto the Deere plateless type hoppers (same as the finger pickup meters mount on the hoppers, and interchange with Deere feedcup meters for beans in the old days, or their own copy of the Kinze brush meters they came up with later on because the feedcups sucked so bad at spacing and rates). With Kinze brush meters, I could plant cotton, grain sorghum, and soybeans just like a sewing machine. If I wanted to plant corn, all I had to do was remove 2 thumbscrews and swap the brush meters out for Deere or Kinze finger pickup corn meters, and go to the field.
Later! OL J R :)

[@craigmilligan616]

I had a 494 and used it for many years. Sold it at an auction in 2013, probably for scrap.

[@pinesedgefarm1155]

Some good planters.

[@ericbernau2]

Lot of memories cleaning out the dry fertilizer boxes...was not a fan

[@lukestrawwalker]

Yeah filling them wasn't much fun either... OL J R :)

[@timnichols9015]

My dad had a 494 until 1989......about the last one in our area! Neighbor had a 495 with the chain high speed delivery system. That system got pulled out and scrapped the first year. Ya Precision Planting and now again Deere has the high speed systems. Not a new idea......maybe they have it right this time???

[@lukestrawwalker]

Yeah now they use a seed brush belt running down the seed tube... seed is metered by electric drive vacuum seed meters directly to the brush, which sweeps the seeds down the tube via electric drives that are "synchronized" with ground speed. As the brush reaches the bottom end of the seed tube, the seed pops out of the brush bristles at the bottom edge of the surrounding tube, and since the bottom roller of the brush is turning the same speed as the planter is moving forward, theoretically the seed drops straight down out of the brush bristles into the seed furrow with about an inch or so "dead drop" with no forward momentum, so no tumbling or rolling or "seed bounce". SO, theoretically the planter can run 10 mph and still achieve the same spacing accuracy as at the typical corn planting speed of 4-5 mph...
They work, but they're REALLY complicated, and expensive... no direct drive options for the meters or belts available-- it's all electric drives operated by an on-board computer that automatically monitors and varies the meter and belt speed to measured ground speed (GPS I suppose, since radar is kinda passe) and of course seed population meters. They could have achieved the same thing 50 years ago with a seed brush tube that was ground driven, which would automatically adjust to ground speed, being ground driven! Course plate-type metering back then was pretty primitive; no way you're gonna get good singulation out of plates-- we ran plate meters up until the early 90's. In fact we had a Cole planter that the dealer threw in when Grandpa bought a Case David Brown tractor in the late 70's... It was a "blackland" type planter (gauge wheel, followed by a triangular "buzzard wing" sweep shaving off a couple inches from the top of the bed, followed by a small sword opener to make the seed furrow and deposit the seed in the soil, followed by a pair of offset narrow shovels 3-4 inches on either side of the furrow, to throw loose moist soil over the seed from either side. They work, but they lose a LOT of moisture and can kill you in a dry year-- why we switched to an old Deere 7100 I picked up and reconditioned. Anyway, the Cole was probably the high point of plate-type planters... it used a PAIR of counter-rotating side-by-side seed plates, operating at a 45 degree angle at the front of the sloped seed hopper over each row. The idea was, using TWO plates per row instead of one, meant each plate only had to turn HALF AS FAST, giving the plates more time to properly singulate and meter the seeds out. The plates were slightly "cone" shaped compared to the flat Deere, IH, etc bottom-mount horizontal plates used in their old plate-type meters. The seed pockets were arranged around the rim of the cone, and they dipped down to the bottom of the hopper at the front behind a metal shield to keep the pressure off the seed and the depth of the "seed pool" correct, seeds would slide in to the plate seed pockets around the outer edge of the plates, and then the plates would rotate around and upward along the 45 degree slope of the front hopper bulkhead in special tracks... there was only room for ONE SEED in each seed pocket, so any extra seed simply fell out of the pocket or from between the small "fingers" that divided each pocket from the next, and dropped back down into the seed pool at the bottom of the hopper. The seeds would go almost all the way to the top of the hopper, giving them plenty of time for extra seeds to fall back, until the seed pockets in the 45 degree angled plates swept past the seed release hole in the plate "bottom"... the seeds were held in place by gravity in the sloped seed pockets, sliding along the "bottom" until they came to the release hole, where they'd slide out of the plate seed pockets and out the hole. The whole system was VERY slick because the metering system was all gear-driven and timed so the left plate of each row released a seed, then the right plate, alternating back and forth to get very accurate spacing. Where they dropped the ball was, the seed plate release holes were then dropping seed into a "metal funnel" shaped back cover that then ducted the dropped seeds down to a rubber seed tube that dropped VERTICALLY down from the toolbar-mounted seed hoppers and plate meters into the sword opener seed boot, which the seed tube slid up and down in as the gauge wheel rode over rises or dips or clods in the soil. The seed I'm sure took some pretty good bounces off that sheet metal funnel inside it, then bounced around like crazy in the rubber seed tube, and with no "back-slope" like the 7100 planter (and other modern planters) the seed dropped STRAIGHT DOWN the tube to the furrow, where the bottom of the furrow was moving past the sword opener opening at 6 mph (which is the speed we planted at most of the time in cotton and grain sorghum and soybeans). SO needless to say, the seed rolled and bounced when it hit the furrow moving forward at that speed...
There were a number of design efforts to come up with better planters even back then... like this "high speed" chain and paddle arrangement, but NOBODY seemed to really put it together. The Cole plate system was probably *THE* best and most accurate plate system ever devised, as it would SINGULATE pretty well, and using dual plates to slow the meters down was a brilliant idea... Plus it allowed the Cole to be set up easily to plant DOUBLE ROWS spaced up to 7.5 inches or so apart, by removing the metal funnel and replacing it with TWO independent longer rubber seed tubes, each dropping down individually, into TWO separate side-by-side sword openers (once you loosened the one up and slid it over on the mounting tube, and bolted on a second one next to it) and then moved the covering shovels in the back further out, and added a third shovel running between them down the center of the bed to lap soil either way into both of the double-row furrows. If Deere or IH had mated this type plate metering system with their 7000 type planting row units, they'd have had a winner. I've seen old Oliver or White or Allis Chalmers planters that mounted a large seed plate VERY low on the row unit so it was practically dropping the seed out just a couple inches above the seed furrow, using a sword-type runner opener to create the furrow, and using a large disk with a high number of seed cell pockets around the edge of the larger seed disk (after all these were early electric-blower powered air planters) would result in much greater seed spacing accuracy. Sword openers were a sh!tty way to make a furrow in anything but well tilled soil, however, and NO good in high residue or no-till conditions. The 7000 Deere planters really revolutionized the planter design with the double-disk openers, flanked by gauge wheels directly on either side to set the depth directly at the same point where the seed was being released, cleaning the disks and controlling the planting depth at the same time, followed by the small pair of V-closing wheels to pinch the seed furrow shut. This design coupled with the plateless (finger pickup) meter for corn really revolutionized corn planting, though the Cole with its twin inclined plates could plant corn very very accurately as well, and FAR better than ANY hopper bottom horizontal plate unit, but without the complexity of the large number of moving parts in the finger pickup meters or electric blowers on the earliest air planters... (or centrally-mounted PTO or later hydraulically-driven air or vacuum systems). Deere could only offer a "feed cup" for planting other crops than corn with a 7000/7100 type planter set up for the plateless finger pickup drives, however, which was basically little better than the "controlled spill" metering of a grain drill feed wheel type meter. Kinze finally came out with a brush meter that used a vertical seed disk similar to the old horizontal hopper bottom seed plates, but running vertically in a housing with a brush to hold the seeds in the pockets, which were sized to be only capable of holding one seed at a time, so the excess seeds were brushed away and fell back to the bottom of the hopper seed pool. Since Kinze built his first planters with Deere row units and since Deere planters were dominating the market at that point, he designed his brush meters to bolt DIRECTLY onto Deere plateless finger-meter seed hoppers in place of the primitive "feed cup meters" and could meter seeds like cotton, grain sorghum, soybeans, and others, just like a sewing machine. The spacing and accuracy of the population and metering was excellent. Refitting a Deere planter with these Kinze brush meters would give it a planting accuracy neck-and-neck with a vacuum or air pressure planter, at a fraction of the cost and complexity. Plus, for planting corn, finger pickups were easily swapped in for the brush meters (and vice versa) to plant corn with good accuracy, particularly compared to the horizontal hopper-bottom plate meters they replaced...
Now it's all air and vacuum planters, and more and more, pushing for electric drives instead of ground driven seed rate transmissions. The gains are very small over a well maintained finger pickup (for corn) and brush meter setup (for all other row crop seeds) and the complexity, upkeep, and initial costs are huge. Similarly, the upgrades and "improvements" to the original 7000/7100 series double-disk row units are marginal at best...
Later! OL J R :)