IN a 'coals-to-Newcastle' type move, Western Australian combine harvester parts manufacturer and retailer, Harvestaire Pty Ltd, is negotiating to sell its replacement header sieves in the United States of America.
Dirk Vorster, general manager of the Balcatta-based company, confirmed last week he was negotiating with an agricultural supplies company with a network of outlets across the USA to supply it with locally-made top and bottom sieves to suit five models of headers.
"We are speaking to the largest header parts supplier in the USA and it was actually them that came to us - it's only for five models, but it is a start," Mr Vorster said.
"We used to export header sieves to the USA but with our manufacturing costs in Australia our pricing became uncompetitive and we stopped that about a decade ago."
What has suddenly made Harvestaire sieves price competitive again in the USA and enabled a significant price drop locally on replacement smaller sieves for some combine harvester models for the coming harvest, is a robotic spot welder.
After 40 years in the same Balcatta factory, Harvestaire moved to new premises a few blocks away in Booth Place at the beginning of this year.
Mr Vorster said the move to a bigger premises provided an opportunity to upgrade some of the manufacturing equipment - 55 per cent of the replacement parts Harvestaire sells it manufactures in Balcatta and 45pc are imported.
"Our previous spot welder was past its lifetime usage, we couldn't move it without risking damage to it," he said.
So, along with two new milling machines and a new bandsaw, the company also designed and sourced a custom-built robotic spot welder using a Bosch robot to weld the louvres into its header sieves.
"It was a project we were working on for 15 months," Mr Vorster said.
At this stage, welding the sieve frames together and assembling the pressed metal louvres on wires and inserting them into the frames are still manual tasks.
But the robotic welder has taken over the repetitive and time-consuming task of spot welding the louvres on the wires in the frames.
Essentially the welder is twin side-by-side level tables connected by an overhead gantry carrying computer-controlled dual welding heads.
An assembled header sieve is placed on one table, the operator selects the appropriate computer program to suit that particular model sieve - the program tells the welding heads exactly where to place spot welds with millimetre-perfect precision - and the robotic welder starts spot welding at one end and works its way progressively down the sieve.
In the meantime the operator places another assembled sieve on the other table and once the robot has finished welding the first sieve it automatically moves along the gantry and starts on the second sieve.
The computer can hold up to 300 individual welding programs.
"We had a maximum capacity of between 30 to 40 sieves a week on the previous machine," Mr Vorster said.
"Now, with the new machine, at capacity we can make 80 to 100 sieves a week.
"That's not on all sieves - it's on the Case IH flagship ones and smaller sieves - those ones are easy to handle so we use double tables on the spot welder.
"For larger sieves, like for the John Deere 700 and 600 series, our capacity used to be about 15 a week.
"We've probably got it up to 25 a week now."
Mr Vorster said production benefits from the robotic welder are passed on to local farmers as cost savings.
"In round figures, I think we've managed to reduce the cost of top and bottom Case flagship sieves by about $200 a sieve between harvests 2022 and 2023 because we've reduced the labour needed," he said.
"Material costs have gone up and the cost of labour has also gone up - labour is also now hard to find - but there is less of a labour component now to produce more sieves, so the overall unit cost has come down.
"We haven't yet seen the same cost benefits in the larger sieves, but the machine (robotic spot welder) was only commissioned about 10 weeks ago.
"But we have managed to keep prices stable -- there have been some increases - but generally large sieve prices are stable.
"The second benefit (for farmers) is quality.
"Although we never had an issue with our sieves in the past, there is no comparison between a spot welder that is 25-30 years old and the latest technology - it gives us much greater flexibility in our welds, not only can we change the heat in the welds, we can make the weld pulse.
"Because the weld pulses through the gal (galvanised) louvre and the gal wire, we get a perfect weld every time.
"It is the only robotic header sieve welder in the world."
Mr Vorster said Harvestaire was the largest manufacturer of aftermarket header sieves in the world, with possibly only original equipment manufacturers (OEM) producing more.
"Last year we manufactured just shy of 700 sieves for the year," he said.
"In Australia we support about 140 models - top and bottom sieves.
"We still hold sieves for old TR and TX headers (New Holland models dating back to the 1970s and 1980s) - we sell a couple of those a year - and we did a (sieve set for a 1980s John Deere) Titan 2 a few weeks back.
"We continue to support farmers even with older machines.
"The feedback we get from our customers of header parts is that our Harvestaire aftermarket sieves are, in a lot of cases, better than OEM sieves because of the way we manufacture them - we put in nylon bushes (to minimise metal-to-metal friction) and nylon strips down the side (to limit vibration) so in harsh Australian harvesting conditions our sieves don't rattle apart.
"This will be the first of many robots we introduce to increase the production flow through efficiencies.
"We are using technology to make ourselves more competitive."
Harvestaire has just put out its header parts catalogue for the 2023 harvest, for information go to harvestaire.com.au.
