Flaman Rentals Blog

How a Bench Custom Grain Cleaners More Than Pays for Itself.

Posted by Jeff Brown Nov 19, 2024

It’s a scene that’s played out on farm after farm across Canada. Flaman Sales Specialist James Vanbeselaere positions your input and output augers, sets four levelling jacks, flips a switch on the central electric panel, and another farmer is in business. 

If you’ve read our other Bench Custom Grain Cleaners Blog, you know that the business of on-farm grain cleaning makes good long-term economic sense. That blog discussed the savings you could bank, potentially over decades. With James’s help, this one details the ease, versatility, and benefits of operating your own personally customized cleaner. 

Easy Start Up
“They usually reach us somewhat assembled, so we can pull it out to the customers already set up to go,” James explains. Very little time elapses between when it arrives in your yard and when it starts running - just enough to complete the wiring and the steps outlined above. 
 
Ease of Use
The first goal of customizing a Bench cleaner is customer convenience. The central electric panel gives users quick, easy-to-reach, and unobstructed access to the Variable Frequency Drive (VFD) controls that govern their intake and output auger speeds. 

Customers are also likely to admire the convenient method Bench devised for changing screens.

“The A1door latch system is unlike some cleaners that have grader shells you have to unbolt to take off,” James explains. “You wouldn’t have to do that with an Airens screen.” The Bench method is an easy slide-out, slide-back-in process, as James demonstrates in this video.



Dockage doesn’t stand a chance.
“The Bench 54 by 72-inch portable grain cleaner would probably be our most popular unit,” James says. That unit is equipped with components from another manufacturer, Premier Grain Cleaner of Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota. Like other Bench models, it does just about everything you could ask to winnow out everything but the top-quality grain you want.

Lighter material is immediately vacuumed away by the Cyclo air system pre-aspirator. Vibrating shaker shoes vibrate the scalp deck, grade deck, and sift deck. Each shoe sits above bouncing balls that help move materials to screens where they either fall through to the next layer or are taken off as dockage. That and a final round of Cyclo aspiration effectively removes everything from straw and rocks to fine chaff. 

A Team of Machines 
There’s even more you can do to deliver pristine commodities, thanks to Bench’s modular extensions. If you’re cleaning barley, you may want to start with a Bench de-bearder to improve your commodity’s flow-ability going into the grain cleaner - and its test weight afterward.
 
Once you’ve filtered the impurities out of your grain, you can take out the broken kernels using an indent screen. This screen is wrapped around a rotating drum, using centrifugal force to hold kernels of a desired length in the screen’s pockets while smaller kernels fall off the drum and are taken off as dockage. It’s a popular item, for good reason, as James explains.

“There were some grain cleaners we sold in La Crête, Alberta that had just Airens screens with indents because he’s mainly cleaning wheat. They grow a lot of wheat and canola up there.” Indent screens are ideal for longer-grain crops like wheat, which has been the commodity that creates the most demand for grain cleaning, James says.

Portable Possibilities
Wheat may be the crop most customers want to clean, but Bench provides options for a wide spectrum of cereal, oilseed, and pulse crops. Priding itself on versatility as well as portability, Bench offers cleaning equipment designed to handle barley, beans, canola, chickpeas, flax, oats, soybeans and sunflowers.

Flaman also has its own screen distribution facility in Saskatoon. As with Bench, we offer an inventory that’s carefully selected to take excellent care of the crops you put in your bins.

Kind to Your Commodities. Easy on Electricity.
“It’s a gentle feed,” James says of Bench cleaners’ easy-going stability. Those carefully set levelling jacks prevent a great deal of commodity damage by offsetting uneven terrain, but Bench took its smooth, crop-friendly operation an extra step.
  
“There are eccentrics underneath that provide a counterbalance,” James says, adding mention of another important benefit: “Once the shaker’s moving back and forth, little horsepower is required to move the tray, because of the momentum. So, guys don’t have to worry about having a big enough power supply to run these.” 

Like to Know More about Operating Your Own Custom Grain Cleaner? 
Flaman Grain Systems experts are ready to show you in-stock Bench Grain Cleaners and answer any questions you have. Call or visit your nearest Flaman location to discuss effective, economical solutions to your farm’s specific requirements.
Posted in Product Information | Tagged with Grain Cleaning | More articles by Jeff Brown