Innovation comes from within
At Samart Kaset Yon, we enjoy any opportunity to interact with our customer base. We frequently get questioned on the unique design of our machines. The simple fact is that unlike much of the harvester product on the market, our machines are designed from “the ground up” as sugar cane harvesters.
To explain this we have to go back in time several decades, where many agricultural vehicle constructors took the tractor as the base vehicle and modified or added equipment to achieve a specialist machine. The first harvesters were actually tractor based. Unfortunately, many design traits associated with those original machines still remained locked in the designs produced by many of our competitors.
For example, the top cutter. The top cutter was necessary in the early days where machines needed to remove much of the leaf from the cane prior to it moving onto the cane elevator. Basically, because, otherwise it jammed. On modern machines however, the chopping and cleaning systems are such that full stalk cane is handled easily, and in Samart designs we dispensed completely with top cutters from the word “go”.
Dispensing with this complex equipment saves a phenomenal amount of cost at manufacture and (as the machine is not driving all that useless machinery during operation), also fuel. The top cutter also adds maintenance costs, and is a safety hazard restricting the driver’s forward vision. Accidents have occurred simply because the driver could not see past the top cutter.
Notice also, the weight distribution of the Samart designs? Most of the competitive sugarcane harvesters still have larger diameter wheels on the rear of the machine, a legacy of their tractor heritage. A harvester needs to be designed “weight forward” so that the drive is coming directly behind the crop divider assembly. It then makes sense to put the larger diameter wheel directly under that weight. So weight forward, wheels forward, just like the Samart machines. This configuration also works well with our tracked variants, once again, the weigh is where it should be.
Our ethos is that we keep things simple, effective and efficient. During the COVID period we spent time reworking our base cutter systems and making our chaff blower system more efficient, all the time, working towards a net saving in fuel and maintenance. The base cutter assembly has been repositioned to become more tolerant to shock loads from impact on stones and debris that may from time to time come in contact with the blades and the blower hood has been replaced with an all metal smooth flow design, which improves chaff rejection and durability.
At the Sugarex show (Khon Kean), during 2022 we also announced our SER (Selective Engine Revision) programme. Actually the program had been running pre-COVID, but was only at a stage to be publicised late 2022.
During the development of the program we set market challenging targets for exhaust emission reduction and fuel usage. Whilst we recognise that emissions are important in world terms it is the crippling penalty that farmers have to bear in relation to fuel prices that we feel will most provoke interest in our new product.
The SER control system takes guesswork and stress out of the driver’s job and ensures a millisecond response to variations in power demand. A simple, easy to use control set up allows for economical running during normal operations with a 17% power boost when difficult conditions are met.
The low engine working speed coupled with high torque also provides an estimated increase of 30% in engine life versus previous product. Reduced stress in the entire system means that SER program engines surpass fuel usage targets whilst providing users with 15-20% more usable power and a 15 % reduction on fuel per tonne.
Plus, we selected engines and control systems which not only surpass current emission requirements in our home market, but which will allow more demanding emission levels to be fulfilled as regulations become tighter in the future.
Sugar cane harvesters are complex machines and it would be easy to tell our customers that we have a revolutionary designed machine which will double their profits and make them the envy of their farming neighbours. The plain fact is that we don’t. Nobody does. In the same way that cars still run on four wheels, the basic functional configuration doesn’t change. But, at Samart, we challenge those configurations and make the right decisions to maximise the effectiveness of our product.
The Samart ethos has resulted in our latest model, the “SM200 Predator” hitting the market with overwhelming interest. It encompasses the above features into a modern effective machine. Like its namesake (Predator) it is a fast, flexible, multirole machine equally at home on a small field plot or a cane plantation. It offers remarkable performance, and gives farmers productivity blended with economy and effective maintenance management.
The SM200 Predator is now available to order from our sales locations.
