The company was contacted this summer by Time and invited to nominate its unique Razors Edge combine concave to be considered for recognition.

“I thought it was a joke, at first,” CEO Jeremy Matuszewski says.

“We weren’t aware they recognized inventions every year. After we won two awards at Ag in Motion, they reached out and asked if we were interested in applying. So we applied. It was that simple.”

WHY IT MATTERS: A harvesting innovation developed by a Prairie farm equipment manufacturer has now boosted the company’s international profile.

The Razor’s Edge concave beat out five other nominations in the agriculture category.

At Ag in Motion this year, Matuszewski praised the unique design of the concave line, focused more around “how the material flows through a combine.”

The concave line, designed around individual combines, is meant to improve cleaning and separation and removes the need to change between crops.

Farmers can have a slower rotor speed and wider concave clearance, and are also being sold on the design with a promise of more efficient operation and less fuel cost. They’re likewise promised that they can “say goodbye to the hassle of cover plates,” on the company’s website.

Features include a tighter design on the point of the concave with greatest crop impact. Material posted by the company points to lower grain loss during harvest due to fewer bottlenecks in material flow and, in general, better ability to “keep material flow smooth and consistent — no more overloads or downtime.”

History of wins

It’s not clear if winning the awards at AIM was what brought the concaves to Time’s attention, but, “the timing was pretty particular,” Matuszewski says.

Key prerequisites for nomination were that the product had to be new and commercialized this year and found to be making a difference in the market, Matuszewski recalls about the application process.

On its website, the magazine writes that it has been compiling its list of the “most impactful new products and ideas in Time’s Best Inventions issue” since 2000. It adds that editors evaluated each contender on “a number of key factors, including originality, efficacy, ambition and impact.”

In all, the magazine recognized 300 of what it terms groundbreaking inventions and 100 special mention inventions across a wide variety of categories. Aside from the recognition and publicity, there is no other reward for the winners.

The final list was announced in early October and the winners will be published in the November print edition.

“They put one (winner) on the cover,” says Matuszewski of the upcoming November issue.

“It is a housekeeping robot. It’s pretty cool. But you can order a cover they’ll ship to you with your invention on it. But it’s not the actual cover.

“Anytime you win an award adds more credibility to the product, but how the product performs is ultimately going to dictate the sales and ultimate growth of that product.”

Time’s list can be found online.

The post Prairie-made combine concaves make Time top inventions list appeared first on Grainews.

Winkler, Man.-based Thunderstruck Ag has just introduced its own Razors Edge concave design to make that a possibility.

“We’ve been working with concaves for the last seven years and with farmers to dial in a different brand that we represented,” says the Razors Edge concave’s inventor and founder of Thunderstruck Ag, Jeremy Matuszewski. “As I worked through that, we used cover plates. Last year we invented the TNT cover plates to control how the material unloads into the separating area.

“The problem with cover plates is every time you change something, the machine changes — so you have to look at your rotor speed, fan speed, sieve settings. So I just wanted to come up with a way to use one concave with all crops, no cover plates, and do it by using a different bar spacing than what anyone’s ever tried before.”

Razors Edge concaves use a variable spacing that is narrower near the front and progressively widens toward the rear.

“In a typical concave section the bars are almost always spaced the same,” he explains. “There’s not a lot of difference between them.

“So my thought was, what if I created really tight spacing where the material first hits the concave section, toward the back it gets a little more open, and use the concept from the cover plates to control with my bars where the material unloads? Nobody had ever tried that before.”

Matuszewski says he took the initial Razors Edge prototypes to Australia last year for field trials and they performed well. But he says harvesting conditions on that continent are usually a little less demanding than here in North America, because of the drier climate.

After some minor design tweaks from lessons learned there, testing began here.

“My thought was, it worked great in Australia, but is it going to work in North America? I wanted to do more extensive testing in North America this year. So I tested it on 25 farms, running multiple machines, in Canada as far west as Alberta and as far east as Ontario (and) in the U.S. from Washington to Ohio, in a wide variety of different crops and conditions.

“It was really impressive. We made a couple more tweaks on things we learned in our testing this year, and we’re in production for 2025.”

Razors Edge concaves are available for most rotary combine models, with bar spacings engineered specifically for each combine, because rotors in each brand perform a little differently and need different spacings for optimum performance.

Another design difference on the Razors Edge concaves is a sharper and notched bar, to help improve threshing performance.

“I’ve laser-clad that edge, so it won’t dull,” he says. “It’ll sharpen as it threshes. We took the bar concept that’s been out there for a while and made it a little bit different and laser-clad it. So we have something that’s a little bit different. It’s a premium product and will last a long time.

“We used it in edible beans and there’s no cracking, because of that notch.”

The company can be reached through its website.

The post New aftermarket rotary combine concaves designed for all crops appeared first on Grainews.

John Deere drill specialist and technician Logan Wemyss of the engineering firm Aricks Australia is in Canada this summer working with Thunderstruck Ag Equipment of Winkler, Man. His mission? Helping owners of late model John Deere drills better understand how to maintain the openers on them.

His company also offers a range of specialty parts to upgrade disc openers on Deere drills through Thunderstruck Ag in Canada. Take a look!

The post VIDEO: Learn how to maintain your John Deere drill appeared first on Grainews.