Service: Amazone ED-602-K precision seeder With the maize planting season just over the horizon, Amazone technical support engineer Chris Bendall takes Andrew Pearce through a full service of an ED Classic
Over the 15+ years that ED vacuum seeders have been around, Amazone has simplified and beefed up the design. Now in its third generation, the tractormounted side of the ED family comes in four-, six- and eight-row forms for maize, with or without a folding toolbar according to size. Two sowing unit variants are on offer: the Classic for ploughed land and the Contour for drilling into mulch.
ED drills rely on two fans. Driven either hydraulically or by pto, one pressurises air for fertiliser distribution to forwardmounted disc or Suffolk coulters, while the other creates a part-vacuum for use by the individual sowing units. Separate landwheel drives power the metering systems for seed and fertiliser, working through chains and gearboxes to deliver seed spacings from 31mm to 869mm and material rates from 50kg/ha to 550kg/ha. Alternative singling discs cater for different seed groups.
The exceptionally tidy ED-602-K model used for this article belongs to a Sussex contractor, who covers about 404ha (1,000 acres) annually with it on soils ranging from Downland chalk to Weald clays. Set up with Classic sowing units and Suffolk coulters, the three-year-old drill’s hydraulic fan drive means that there’s very little to service at the headstock end — so we’ll start with the seeders.
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