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Southwest Illinois | We have a Turbo Till, but I have used an excellerator and most recently demonstrated the new VTFlex 435 from CaseIH. Honestly we bought the Turbo till 10 plus years ago from a neighbor. Bought it because it was cheap and we thought it would work well on a few hundred acres of rolling ground that we had. The first fall we used it all the trash blew off the field into the road ditch so we stopped using it in the fall. The next year it sat in the shed. Year 3 was wet and we ran it in standing or worked stalks and it made a pretty respectable seed bed out of what would be best described as mud. Not supposed to be out there in mud but it was early July and we had no choice. Since then we have planted 95% of our beans behind it. Makes a great seedbed, however it doesn't kill many weeds and doesn't level a field very good if it has ripper ridges or any kind of small rut. Dealer has been trying to sell us a TurboMax but I have been leery of the extra weight. The Turbo Till is well built, we typically have a 580 quad on it running 12mph and have no issues besides a random wheel bearing. Been thinking of upgrading because we really neeed something wider than 30 feet and used a 435 CaseIH which is somewhat similar to the excellerator as well as the Great Plains TerraMax. IMO anything that has concave or slightly cupped blades will not penetrate dry hard ground consistently and anything deeper than 2" brings a lot of clumps, rootballs and chunks up and they just don't have enough finishing options to break down our tight clays. If you set them any shallower they don't really create much loose dirt. The Turbomax has adjustable gangs(Turbo Till does not) so it should move a bit more dirt than a TurboTill. We used to have a DMI730C disc ripper and it left cornstalks on the rougher side and our Turbo Till worked but it was still rough when we planted. Behind our 875 ripper it is a non-issue. The McFarlane Incite seems to be the only tool that has enough finishing options to get the job done with concave type blades, but it is incredibly heavy so I think we are staying away from it. Not sure if you are looking new or used but Great Plains has a fair amount of leftover TurboMax's sitting around since they came out with the TurboMax VT1100 series. They are cutting some pretty good deals on them. The Krause is certainly a well built tool as well, we just don't see much of their equipment in SW IL. I have two local Great Plains dealers and both said they sell 10 TurboMax's for every TerraMax. But in reality they are different animals to a certain extend. If you want to move more dirt and kill more stuff you probably need to steer towards the Excellerator, the 435 or the TerraMax. | |
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Turbo Max or Excellerator?
