Hot on the heels of Lely’s continuous baler in September, Vicon has unveiled the FastBale baler – a non-stop round baler wrapper combination that joins together a pre-chamber with a main chamber, plus a wrapper.

Developed at the Kverneland Group’s baler centre at Ravenna, Italy, FastBale claims to be both the world’s only non-stop fixed chamber baler and the only non-stop fixed chamber baler wrapper combination.

See also: Lely unveils speediest baler yet

Two chambers arranged in series mean that several rollers can be shared. Operating as a pre-chamber, the first section of FastBale produces two-thirds of the bale.

Then, as the pre-chamber reaches its pre-set density, crop flow is diverted into the main bale chamber allowing baling to continue non-stop.

The pre-chamber is then opened, moving the pre-formed bale into the main chamber, where it can be taken to its maximum size of 1.25m. Once bale formation is complete, crop flow is switched back to the pre-chamber again to allow baling to continue non-stop.

Net is then applied to the completed bale, the tailgate is opened and the finished bale is transferred on to the wrapper. This entire process enables baling to continue uninterrupted.

To make bale transfer simple and reliable, the engineers devised a wrapper frame mounted on a parallel linkage. This enables the wrapper to be lowered to meet the completed bale as it simply rolls from the main chamber. This, says the company, avoids the need for a complex mechanical transfer system.

At this point, the wrapper is raised to allow twin satellite arms to wrap the bale. Unlike traditional wrapping mechanisms, FastBale’s twin satellite arms rotate in a vertical plane. Once complete, the wrapper is lowered and the rear wrapper roller is then raised, releasing the wrapped bale on to the ground. Vicon also says the FastBale is shorter than any other baler-wrapper combination on the market. 

Field testing will continue throughout 2015 and the machine is likely to be on sale in 2016.