8700TT Review

Well that’s better then the pictures I have of a belt feeder. Haha.

Hopefully you torqued the slats cause they told us that was pretty important to do.
How does a slat get bent like that anyway?

It was a couple years ago a saw it...... so yes it was tested

Not much going on here, so I'll take a stab at this question. From what I have seen so far this machine is actually smaller than a 780. I do know that this was a tough year in cereals with a lot of crop barely ready, but I have done that before and the machine handled it. Seems to have a hard time threshing as good as the 700 series,ran higher returns typically this year to get the sample clean. Also rotor belt always showing slip alarm if I push it in tough straw, even to the point of shutting off the auto-stop at it's lowest sensitivity setting. Rotor loss has been fixed totally from what I have seen, only twice did I have all 4 rotor covers open in wheat and it was late at night. I honestly don't see why anyone would spend the extra money for a 8800 because the extra grate section and higher speed on the rotors are not as critical anymore, those new grates must let a lot more material out! It's always sieve loading that is the limiting factor so far, and that never got increased in size. Sometimes the extra HP would be useful, but the belt slippage is a concern. First couple of days this thing was unreal in peas, then it seemingly went to more what I would expect from the 700 series for cylinder belt slippage. In canola the one field I did so far was basically dust in the machine and 600 bu/hr or 2.5mph was all it would do. Lots of pods on ground which I have never seen from a "P" variety, so it was dried up pretty bad. Never had to run that slow ever with my 780's, we ended up parking cart to save tractor hours and went and did other stuff. Big hopper and fast unload made that a better option. Now we are waiting on canola that's not ready, hopefully we can spool it up in there!

Otherwise it has been pretty reliable, small oil line dripping and a pulley support bracket cracked. Belt feeder has behaved since it went crooked. Biggest issue is the unload auger only goes into high speed movement half the days. Some sensor or solenoid must be acting up. I usually just leave it out instead of holding the button for 30 seconds every time I want to swing it.

So for me there are incremental gains with the big hopper and unload speed, as well as the road speed being higher. But in my conditions this year the Sunnybrook components on a 780 would be my pick.

Easy on fuel and def too, can get 250 acres of tough wheat on a tank of fuel. Did 700 acres of wheat and Def was still about 20% remaining

80x30=2400 bu/hr. That is a lot of grain but I did hit those numbers on occasion with my 780 in the right conditions. Those conditions were not necessarily power limit either.

Today we got a 780 in the field with the 8700. Didn't go well for the 8700, they screwed up with this machine in canola. I'm not the only one having problems either. Speaking with another owner we feel it's probably the design of the rotor grates letting too much through and over-loading sieves. I give a giant "F" to whoever field tested this machine, obviously they never saw a properly setup 700 series. Just this evening I did probably a good 25% more with the 780 than the 8700 in standing canola....  ;-|

I must say, even I am disappointed. Have all the new machines gone to that series or are the 700 series still available? Can you make changes to it to make it better? Sunnybrook parts maybe?

Ken I am running a Claas Vario header, which is an auger header. That is the ticket in canola for sure, works awesome! 780 was running a FD145 which I was running. In fluffy dry canola the header was limiting factor at times. Generally we have seen a 1/2 mph advantage over the years with the Vario compared to FD headers on same machine.

Kevlar all new machines are now 7000(narrow body) or 8000(wide body) machines. The 700 series are done. I think that Claas will figure out what is going on and do updates. My strong advice on the old forum was that ALL small grains machines should get high speed rotors. Obviously they chose to leave that feature only on the largest model and tinker with the rotor grate setup, which turns out to be looking like a huge backfire. These machines were lights out in canola before, nothing could touch them for capacity and losses. 

Meskie why smaller? Because it has a few less HP? We were pi$$ing around at 20-30% power for part of the day because of losses. Can't hardly ever use the power the machine has because of excessive losses. Another Claas guy nearby panned his 8700 and 760 in canola, over 4X losses with the 8700!!! The internals on the 8700 are actually bigger than the 780 except for the rotor grates, of which I only actually opened all of them this year on the 8700 twice for probably 2 hours of work...and that was in wheat. 

I like most everything about the machine, but this is something that needs attention. If I wanted something that throws grain over I could have bought any brand, the grain saving is the most important feature to me. I've seen Claas go back and update machines that were several years old to address issues. I'm pretty confident they will fix this, but super frustrating dealing with it now. Good thing my neighbors are done harvest and willing to rent me their 780.

From what I have seen ALL the Claas employees care a great deal about the performance and durability of their equipment. I've actually never seen a company that solicits feedback like Claas and actually does something about it. That's why I find this particular issue so surprising. Actually I had the head guy of Claas of NA sitting in my buddy seat 4 years ago over one of the issues I had when I first started running Lexion, and that issue was fixed by end of season. Also on that machine the turbo-chop plugged with straw and wouldn't adjust and wouldn't give a good spread pattern, they updated that spreader a few times even on the third owner(my neighbors) and it works great now.