We found we're less stressed at the end
of the day and we feel like we could
bale longer into the day because of that.
My name is Nathan Dockter. I work as an
engineer in the Forage Innovations team
at Vermeer. From the initial concept the
best suspension designs we'd seen were
independent so the front end is
suspended by individual hydraulic
cylinders and that provides a smooth
ride over individual bumps or troughs in
the field. What you'll see on the machine
is a yellow arm, we call it an a-arm and
it's attached at two points on the front
frame and that is really our arm that
connects to the front wheel and that
allows the front end to move. That arm is
connected to the frame also with a
cylinder and that absorbs the vertical
load that comes in from hitting bumps in
the ground. So in a tractor typically the
cab is situated right on top of the
rear axle, it's heavily loaded and fixed
you can still suspend the cab but a lot
of those major movements coming in from
the rear axle are still felt in the cab
and in this application the cab is as
far away from the rear axle as possible
over a suspended axle and that's where
we believe the majority of the ride
improvements come from.
The main difference we see is just the
overall body movement is less and
certainly when there's a pretty
aggressive bump coming up typically an
tractor we'll feel some sharp movements
back and forth sometimes there's pitch
forward and back. In the ZR5 those bumps are very smoothed out so those sharp
impacts into the cab are absorbed very
nicely and just overall the movement
of the you know torso and chest and head
and neck are lessened in the ZR5.
