Was ask to post what we knew about the AC Super Stripper cotton stripper that was built. There was only one prototype built and it was cut up/scrapped. A few dealers saw it. Clyde Hamer of AC was the geru / expert on cotton. The super stripper had a 72" stick or boll extractor instead of the 1/2 width Continental Gin 36" unit in the production units.
The basket was larger and had a side shift to accommodate it. The unit was basically built on a F2 combine chassis. The cotton was pulled by either a finger head which pulled off the entire boll or a brush head which basically did the same thing and handled taller cotton. Stripper cotton had to be height limited via chemicals to work well.
The cotton went up a belt, to a blower which took the product up to the burr extractor where a lot of the non cotton fiber material was extracted. From there it was blown into the basket - simple simple simple. Many of the units were updated from the angle iron grates to a pipe grate to remove more non cotton fiber material.
The Deere and Case stripper prototypes built used the old AC heads modified to fit their units.
About a year into testing the light bulb went off and both deere and case scrapped the projects. They could build a $200,000 machine that would last 20 years with almost no repairs instead of a $600,000 + machine that costs thousands per row per year to keep up after a couple o years. Duh....
John B..... of the UT no-til experiment station, developer of the Utra Narrow Row No-til Stripper Cotton system proved that cotton farmers using this system could put an extra million dollars per thousand acres farmed in ten years using his system . It was published in all the magazines in the cotton area. Then he, like the stippers from Deere and Case, found themselves not at work on UNRNTC or what ever the abbreviation was. He suddenly found a much higher paying job, the stripper system was declared a failure and the university strangely found a huge grant to work on super staple picker cotton from deere and case... a mystery to this day - go figure... :-) Our part in this was to work with White planter group in furnishing a 6800 central fill planter to the project on 10" interplant units best I can remember.
AC did not have the dealer organization to support the product in volume and the AC bean counters HATED the cotton strippers. We shipped them from W. Tn and Ark to Texas some years and then back to the eastern US in other years as the stripper market, like the cotton market, was cyclical as an understatement . Ben Pearson was the biggest competition to AC in the cotton stripper market. Another side bar was a few years ago a customer in Ok mounter a stripper w/o the chassis to the front 3pt hitch of a 200 hp tractor and routed a pneumatic blower to feed a large square Hesston / Mf baler pulled behind the tractor . While not probably useable in the US - it did have promise in 3d world countries where the cotton was all picked by hand. Have no knowledge if anything was done with this . All FYI... for what it is worth.
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