This study was conducted to manufacture a miniature version of the widespread threshing machine in Egypt and to evaluate its performance. The threshing machine was manufactured at Tanta Motors factory (Emagro), and its performance was evaluated at Etay El Baroud Agricultural Research Station in 2020 in two independent experiments according to the threshed crop. The crops of soybean and dry bean were threshed at different drum speeds of 350, 400, 450 and 500 rpm (9.34, 10.67, 12.01 and 13.34 m/s) and three feeding rates of 300, 400 and 500 kg/h for performance evaluation. The results indicated that the drum speed of 450 rpm (12.01 m/s) and feeding rate of 500 kg/h were the optimum for both crops, as the lowest criterion costs of 948 and 908.4 L.E/Mg were achieved for soybean and dry bean respectively. Also; the threshing efficiency of 98.03% and 97.79%, seed damage of 2.72% and 2.55%, cleaning efficiency of 97.77% and 97.61%, specific consumed energy of 37.93 and 35.41 kWh/Mg and private cost (operating and fixed costs) of 526.5 and 480 L.E/Mg were obtained with soybean and dry bean respectively.
A front-mounted digger was especially manufactured to be used with the two-wheel tractor for digging onion bulbs, the digger mainly consists of a frame, two detachable shanks and digging blade. Two experiments were carried out in May 2018 at El Gemmieza Agricultural Research Station to evaluate the performance of the developed digger during digging two cultivars of onion namely Giza 20 and Giza red; by testing two types of digging blade namely smooth sharpened edge blade (SSB) and triangular fingered blade (TFB) at three different blade angles of 5 ᵒ , 10 ᵒ and 15 ᵒ . The un-lifted bulbs, damaged bulbs, digging efficiency, onion bulbs storability, required power (kW), consumed energy (kW.h/fed) and total cost were taken into consideration. The results revealed that the TFB caused damaged bulbs ranged between 23.2 -36.04% and 20.22 -33.46% with Giza red and Giza 20 respectively; compared to 1.72 -3.08 % and 1.13 -2.75 % respectively in case of SSB, so that the TFB cannot be used with the developed digger. The results indicated also that; increasing the blade angle decreased the un-lifted and damaged bulbs; and increased the digging efficiency, onion bulbs storability, required power and consumed energy with the two onion cultivars. The highest digging efficiency for SSB and TFB was obtained at blade angle of 15˚ with the two onion cultivars. The highest total digging cost was 96.6 LE/fed and 107.6 LE/fed for SSB and TFB respectively. Therefore; the developed digger can be used with the two-wheel tractor with SSB at blade angle of 15˚.
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