New Combine Forum Spray Tip Questions

welcome ... it's good to see you here ...

Used in the right places, makes a lot of sense. Few things that might put it into perspective whether they'd be worthwhile for you, but a handful of factors to consider.

Few things:


1.    Angle: 45° angle is good.  For vertical targets (e.g. standing wheat/cereal fungicide), or canopy stuff IF you can keep your boom low enough and travel speed slow enough.

The 3D was developed in the UK, where travel speeds are dramatically slower than what we do out here, and in many cases boom heights a lot lower as well, so the spray dynamic with that angle is a whole lot different.
In UK, still a ton of tillage cropping, so with that they are dealing with a lot more dirt clods, so the 3D was intended and designed to be able to fairly confidently get 'around' those dirt clods by having your spray going forward/backward.

As far as downsides to the angled spray, which stands for any angled nozzles, the greater the angle, the greater distance the spray now has to travel to hit target. In North American standards of like 24-30"+ heights, that could mean instead of your spray having to travel like 24" to get into a canopy or hit a target, it might have to be going upwards of like 60" which cuts down a TON of penetration factor/speed/etc. That extra distance also leaves you in a position that you'd have more driftable fines, as more chance for environmental factors to move the spray off target.

Again, the downsides aren't limited to just the 3D itself, just angled spraying in general, as a lot of guys kind of jump on the 'multi-angle or multi-tip spraying' bandwagon and don't know the downsides and why their applications like liberty or fungicide get caught up in the canopy or drift a fair bit worse (in the right conditions of course).

2. Spray Quality: Not too coarse. All in all it is probably a bit fine in most of the smaller sizes (like smaller than an -05), but its finer for applications that need finer spray. Just make sure to keep the angle stuff in mind when it comes to anticipating driftable fines as well. Doesn't provide the most drift reduction itself, so anticipate probably spraying from like 25-35PSI in actual real life conditions. 

As far as a comparative to a Wilger nozzle, they'd be in the realm of between an ER series and SR series nozzle (so the ER would be a conventional flat fan nozzle without any drift control)

3. Nozzle Build/Quality: Nothing really to bawk at here. Had a few growers in the UK that I keep up with that have used em since they came out and they figure they get kind of between the 25-30K acre on a set before they have to replace them. Not a ton of acres, but nozzles are cheap if you consider what you are using them for. (Again, take that with a grain of salt as we manufacture nozzles too. lol) Again, Hypro is a good manufacturer of nozzles. They do a fair bit of work with chem companies to try get things on effectively as possible for growers (like Wilger), so a lot of the innovations might be more based from UK spraying realities but a lot of that is still good movement for us in North America.

4. Overall a good tool in the toolbox, just use it when it makes sense to spray what you are targeting. Good practice is to literally stand in the field and look down and ask "How am I going to hit that <weed/disease/ground>? And address the tool to suit. It's kind of like screwdrivers. You can use a #2 Phillips to take out a #1 phillips screw; BUT, you can really tell the difference when you actually use a #1 phillips. (Side note, I can't find my #1 Phillips bit and of course I hand a handful of screws that were not fun to take out)


Does that make sense? 
Lemme know if you have any questions on that or if I mighta missed something you were looking for,