The 7000 is the best planter. Reliable and accurate. Deere doesn't make the original sensor for the seed tube anymore. If you have to replace the sensor, you may have to replace the seed tube along with it. Shoup may have the original style. I also have the same Yetter fertilizer coulters and had trouble last year with wet stalks wedging between the coulter and opener. I think the openers from a 7200 conservation planter may work better as they are a straight disc set at an angle with the opener against the side of the disc vs behind it. I would remove the meters and store them in a dry place where insects can't get into them. Also I would check out the seed belt to make sure they're in good condition. The only time I've had a 7000 planter stop planting on a row was because of a seed belt failure. I never had any trouble with the main drive chains either. One thing we always did was take them off the drive sprocket when we take the planter down the road. Seem to save them from a lot of wear.
Thanks for sharing I really enjoy watching and learning how you and your family at large go about running a small dairy farm. Looking forward to the continuation of this episode 😊
i have rebuilt my 7000 twice all ready. i plant beans and corn with it. i get my parts from shoup manufacturing in kankakee illinois. my neighbor has a brand new deere planter and i WILL put mine right next to his any day. and i do we have fields right next to each other. my yields this year was pretty much the same as his. my 1 neighbor still plants with a deere 1240 and does good
I worked for a Deere dealer back when the 7000 planters were new. I set a lot of those planters together. A lot of work to set one together from shipping crates to field ready. They were damn good planters. They were very accurate for those times. The trash cleaners were a definite must add on. Not a lot of maintenance to them. They were pretty simple. Go through the finger pickup units every year and chains and sprockets and disk blades and scrapers as they wore out. Bearings in marker disk went out frequently. Especially if you had it set to the max angle. Good pld planters!
An air die grinder and some carbide bits work great for making slots and holes a bit larger and keep smooth edges. Torches are easy to make a mistake with sometimes
Love my 7000 6rn liquid. I have Dawn row cleaners, shoup high downforce springs, yetter twisted closing wheels. I plant corn and beans both with precision planting corn meters and shoup bean meters.
Do you use any graphite when planting? That stuff can sometimes cause an issue with those laser beams in the seed tubes. They sell a brush that you can run down in the tube to clean them out. It's kind of like an oversized pipe cleaner, just ask a dealer they should have them. You can shove it up from the bottom so you won't have to remove the seed boxes. We always carry one on a planter tractor.
I watch the RU-vid channel… 10th generation farmer… work on their corn planter last spring. It was very time consuming. Our little 290 John Deere corn planter never needed any work. Just change the plates to fit the seat size, and then, of course there was the soy beans plate.
I started with putting precision meters in it and was using liquid fertilizer and nitrogen but have found out if I just spread everything much more efficientl and definitely replace the frogs for the planter and replace all springs on row units and get rid of the closing wheels one spiked and one cast and new springs on those to just what I did to mine after first year
I would also have the finger pickup units run on a test stand and anything that needs replacing, replaced,I have percision meters which have ajustable brushes for different size seed.on your seed openers you can check the distances with 2 buisness cards, there are washes behind each opener disk to adjust to correct tolerances,just google this .also on your depth gauge wheel arms where the mustache meets the gauge wheel arm it will wear a divot in the arm,I believe on a 7000 you can switch the two arms on each row unit ,left side to right,right to left which will turn them upside down onto a divot less arm as long as they have not already been switched,I have heard that you can also weld the divot up and then grind it flat , also you should index your planter depth,setting the seed depth handles all in the same position does not mean all row units are planting the same depth,you can also google this procedure for a better explanation
Make sure you adjust the openers every year, there's a trick with business cards to get them right. The chains have to have the same number of links, and when the tensioner is near max you should replace the chains. Pretty much everything the book says. Great idea to convert to the newer clutches/etc.
Also, if you plan to NoTil in heavy or maybe damp ground, you may want to look at the spiked closing wheels. They can make a big difference in emergence.
I guess i didn't pay attention in the spring. Did you plant all the corn with that planter and is it 30" spacing? Can the mounted picker pick 30" rows?
Blow out everything, spider webs are the devil, NK used to have a great program for setting up seed boxes, maybe check IPM/Extension materials for more in-depth. Kevin Kimberley used to be the planter guru
Question ? Instead of buying a corn planter , wouldn't your dad Gorge let you borrow his planter . Then maybe you could have put that money towards a Combine , then that would have been a good trade off , You use your dad's planter, and your dad could use your combine .
