Dan, I hardly know where to start to make comments on your Aerway experience and comments re: your observations. Your experience reminds me of a visit I made to a farm near Kettlersville, OH when I was just starting to build the Gen-Till. I was referred by a family in the area that many would know. They wanted me to go talk with the Aerway owner and they wouldn't tell me much more. The subject being discussed when the referral was made was the ballast requirement. When I arrived the farmer took me into the back row in the large machine shed. The dust was pretty thick back there. His Shattertine equipped machine shattered all the records for ballasting to try to get these things to go into the soil. They started with the factory weights just like you did, 1000#. Then they stacked them two high. Still no go. Then they added on to the frame and added another 1000. still no go. So then they fashioned brackets for the front and added railroad irons. When I said "I'll bet it went in the ground now!" The aging grandfather of the three generations running the place looked at me in disbelief. "Your not too smart are ya? Why do you think it's parked back here?" If you need to call a couple of civil engineers who have come to me in the past to explain why it doesn't want to go into the ground, drop me a line and I'll give you their numbers/email. They will tell you it is a sheepsfoot packer, ya know the tool they use to build the base for highway construction. They run it, then grade, put in drainage on top of that and then stone. This is how they stop frost heaving. The water never soaks into the compacted base. I have worked with farmers from all over the country who built a very good roadbed with the Aerway. In fact, if you want to see two of them (12 footers) in action doing their thing, visit the dirt track at Dundee, NY on the weekend for the stockcar races. They run these babies before they water the track. The combination helps keep the dust down during the longer feature races. Just what every farmer needs is a machine to help hold the moisture in the plow layer, right? Ask your area Aerway rep about the National tillage Lab study on the shattertine done in the late 80's right after it was introduced in 1988. I talked with the chief investigator (Randy ??) back in 1998. He told me that he called the factory about the fact that they couldn't get the machine in the ground. He had figured it was put together wrong. Bulk density changes after two years were the same as doing nothing. Catch the you-tube video I did to see the change they made in the tine geometry in '88. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4vS2zBrZUW4 I strongly suggest you ask the neighbor if you and he can go dig some corn roots sometime where he has been running the Aerway. I think the roots will tell the story with more voracity than I can muster. Also watch what happens in high precip. conditions. I watched it in SW IDaho using irrigation on alfalfa. Yellow machines running everywhere and lakes in low spot when they turned the water off. In fact, one grower bought a brand new one out Burley and said he ran his Damler Diker side by side to compare irrigation water behavior on his alfalfa. Looked exactly the same. He bought a set of Smart-Till tines on the spot and took the new ones off and gave them back to the dealer. I could write several chapters in a book about case studies of the farmers who have believed the literature which I wrote and bought a machine which cannot deliver on the claim to shattertine. The major claim on the patent which got it for them was that it would put soil on top of the field. That it does but at a terrible cost to soil condition. More another time maybe. God Bless and open those eyes.

Jim - I finally ran the Aerway yesterday on this pasture renovation project and it was tough to get it in the ground and tougher then 5 days earlier because the soil had dried. It sure pulled hard and I couldn't pull it with all the weight on the shattertines because the tractor would overheat. I did notice that when I ran the Aerway twice it pulled a lot easier the second time over.

dan pour a small bucket of water in an aerway divot and watch what happens. no fan here, FORMER owner. dave wiebke

Dave - good idea. I finished running the aerway on Sunday and then we had 2.70 inches of rain that night. I am going to run it some more and see what happens and will take a bucket of water and pour it into the divot and see if it ponds and drains.

I don’t have an opinion one way or the other regarding which is better, the Aerway or Gen-Till. At first glance they look nearly identical and seem to work as aerators first and vertical tillage tools second. But from comments on the blog and emails I received it seems that folks have a tough time getting the Aerway to penetrate to the hub and they have to pile on cement blocks and iron castings to do so. That was my initial experience with the Aerway but I chalked it up to compacted tight soil. And to pull it, I had to carry some of the weight on the Aerway tires so I lost some of ballasting necessary for penetration. The Gen-Till is designed differently in that with their helix design the tines aligned on a shaft are indexed so only one tine is entering the soil at one time while with the Aerway several shattertines penetrate at once and the gangs on the Gen-Till angle forward instead of backwards as with the Aerway. With these two changes no ballasting is required beyond the weight of the machine and the forward angle helps pull the tines into the soil. This was explained to me by Jeremy Weiler, shop manager at Gen-Till in Hope, Indiana.

Ya, when Aerway finally had Luke Pritchett standing in the factory next to rollers that were supposed to be mirror-imaged and weren't, they finally admitted they weren't supplying mirror image helixes. Before that the President of the company, Watling, said it didn't matter anyway in a rebuttal column in FarmShow magazine. Pritchet had been bumping his head on the penetration problem with Aerway for a decade in two states when he met me. I showed him the difference a torch and welder could make in creating the proper helix which is what Gen-Till uses today using my jig. I have Jeff Littel, Scottsburg, IN, to thank for the compound helix idea. This maintains the minimum interval between adjacent tine entry positions on a shaft or roller assembly with more than 4 hubs or tine groups. Once you start to build more than this number of hubs on a single shaft, the tine intervals get too close for proper operation. In 2000 Aerway actually announced to all their reps and dealers that they were now building mirror imaged helixes. It was confession time... finally. Aerway still wasn't out of the dark. I was called in to look at a 30 foot aerway that was sold to the second owner in 2005. It was only one year old. It had 5 clockwise and 3 counterclockwise helixes. The equally bad part was that the helix was not uniform and it shook any tractor to pieces you put in front of it. Then aerway decided the best bet was to then make just one roller helix. Make a 22.5 degree helix. It is both clockwise and counterclockwise. Aha! Only problem then was that a shaft longer than 4 rings of tines repeats the tine position in the pattern. So then the pressure per tine for penetration is halved and the shaking goes on. My Smart-Till and Gen-Till roller designs address all of these issues with Littel's help on the longer rollers (over 4 rings). Aerway has finally begun to embrace the solution by using four ring rollers in more models all the time. They are almost to the point now where the only design problem they have left is the tine itself. Last time I checked the Gen-Till, still has a problem finding a bearing that can take the thrust forces when more than four to six rings are contained in a single roller assembly. It will depend too on the angle of offset of the roller. The fact is according to Univ of Sask. investigations the thrust force or axial load on the bearing can be greater than the radial load with the tine design that really fractures soil. You might want to ask Jeremy about the bearing they are using and what they are experiencing with 6 and 9 ring roller bearing life. This was the undoing of the PMF Smart-Till 2200. If the owner ran them at no more than 2.5 degrees of offset it wasn't too bad. The forward offset of the swingarm which Gen-Till uses was done for two reasons. Yes it does tend to penetrate better, just the front gang of a disc does. The ain reason however is because when I built the first one, it would have infringed Aerway's patent on the rear offset swingarm. The fact that I did it to avoid a problem with Aerway, didn't stop them from alleging I had infringed on the swingarm direction. $500 later and threats of counter-suit for Black letter law violations by my patent attorney in MN, and they left me alone. Curse-Buster, by God's Grace, takes advantage of all of this history and invaluable experience and moves up to the next level with the tandem design and a bearing that has equal load capabilities, axial and radial; and aerway's rights to the rear offset swingarm have lapsed now. The frame weight of Gen-Till is much more effective than aerway for sure as Jeremy has said but I know folks who have to ballast the frame in their soils. This is especially so with winged models where the thrust in the wings will lift the center section out of the ground. Same thing with the old PMF 2200. It took some fancy hydraulics to keep it behavin' properly. Curse-Buster frame design has eliminated all of these problems. We tested it for two years. It works right. What a trip it has been!! Probably not over either...yet.

dan what did the bucket test reveal? dave w

Dave W. I haven't done it this yet - this weekend I will give it a try

The water test should be even more effective, Dave, if any significant amount of that rain got into the soil profile. When you do the test Dan, observe how deep the soil has has been moistened. This will be a key to how effectively you can pack the sides of the Aerway hole. I really cooks down to Aerway wanting it both ways. They want manure in the pocket and they make those claims in the literature. They are bonafide... you can observe it. See my pdf on the SCB website. At they same time they call it a Shattertine. If it shatters the soil how does it make a hole that holds manure or a race track that stays wetter longer on Saturday night. Offsetting the roller? Sorry, all that does is change the size of the hole. The last I knew the IA environmental guys said compliance for the aerway applying manure was a hole no more than 4 inches deep. Now why would they make a rule like that? I guess they don't like manure in their drinking water any more than we do. I love the testimony of Andy Reiger in Greensburg, IN. He was forever running around plugging tile outlets where they going to be applying manure or sludge until he changed the tines on his Aerway... no longer an issue. Normal applications of around 10K or less would only wet the top 1 to 2 inches after that change of tines and nothing went into the holes my tine made. Manure applied with an aerway puts manure in the hole because the ground around the tine hole is too hard to absorb the water. Where else is it going to go? YOu're right, and it does that too. (In the air).