Duncan’s Chaff Cutter: 10 t/h, Diesel, and Already Cutting

Forty-four seconds of the diesel chaff cutter at work: maize stover goes onto the conveyor at one end, chopped material leaves in a steady jet at the other.

In September we published Duncan’s first LUCTORC machine — a silage baler wrapper, followed from its factory test in China to the day it was unpacked in Nairobi. He has since added a second machine to Kiko Feeds: a 10 t/h diesel chaff cutter. This time the footage is not of a machine travelling. It is of a machine working.

That difference is the point of this story. A delivery photograph proves a machine arrived. A running machine, fed with the material actually standing on the site, proves something more useful to anyone weighing up the same purchase.

10 t/hrated output

Dieselno mains power needed

2nd machinefrom the same customer

0:44of it running

The machine that came after the baler

Kiko Feeds trades from Kikoville Pavilion in Kisii Town, selling hay, molasses, cottonseed cake, rice germ and mineral salt blocks. Duncan’s first LUCTORC purchase was a silage baler wrapper; that story is still online as Duncan’s Baler: From Factory Test to Kenya.

A chaff cutter does the job that sits in front of a baler, and in front of a feed trough. It takes long material — maize stover, cane tops, grass, straw — and cuts it into short, even lengths. Short material packs tighter, ferments more reliably when it is ensiled, and is far easier for stock to eat without sorting and wasting the stalks. The 10 t/h rating is the largest of the plain diesel and electric ratings LUCTORC lists before the heavier 9Z series begins.

We have not asked Duncan to explain his reasoning and are not going to invent it. What the record shows is a customer who bought one machine, saw it through, and came back for a second.

A red and grey LUCTORC chaff cutter on a factory floor with a long slatted infeed conveyor and a paper order tag reading Kenya Duncan Kisi — The assembled machine on the factory floor, order tag laid on the infeed conveyor. The tag reads “Kenya Duncan Kisi” — the same spelling that was on his baler.

The single-cylinder diesel engine of the chaff cutter, mounted on a blue wheeled skid and carrying the same Kenya Duncan Kisi order tag — The diesel engine, on its own wheeled skid and belt-coupled to the cutter, carrying the same tag.

Tagged with his name before it left

Every unit LUCTORC photographs for a customer carries a paper tag with the destination and the buyer written on it, and the tag stays with the machine through assembly, testing and crating. It is a small habit that does a lot of work: it is how we can show a customer their own machine rather than a stock photograph of the model.

The two photographs show the parts that matter on this build. The long slatted infeed conveyor is what lets one person keep a 10 t/h machine fed without standing over the blades. The engine is a single-cylinder diesel on its own castored skid, belt-driven to the cutter, with a starter motor fitted — so the machine carries its own power and does not depend on a three-phase supply at the site.

A large timber shipping crate in a factory yard, labelled Kenya Duncan Kisi for export — Boxed for the journey, with the same name on the outside of the crate.

Crated for Kenya

The machine was then closed into a timber crate and labelled for Kenya. Duncan’s baler made the same trip and was photographed being opened in a Nairobi yard; this crate’s own arrival was not filmed, so we are not going to describe it.

What we can show is the next time the machine appears on camera — out of the crate, on the ground, and running.

The diesel chaff cutter running on site in Kenya, throwing a jet of chopped maize stover onto a heap beside it — Mid-cut: the machine throws chopped stover clear of itself, building the heap that is already covering the ground around it.

What the video actually shows

The clip runs for forty-four seconds and is unedited apart from our own caption. An operator in a hard hat stands at the far end of the infeed conveyor and feeds whole maize stalks onto it, leaves and all. The engine runs at a steady note throughout. Chopped material leaves the machine in a continuous jet and lands as a growing heap against the wall of the compound.

Around the machine, the ground tells the rest of the story: a wide mat of already-cut material on one side, and a bank of uncut green stalks waiting on the other. The machine is not being demonstrated on a clean sample. It is part-way through a real pile.

10 t/h is the factory’s rating for this machine, not a figure measured at Duncan’s site. No one timed this session, weighed the output or recorded how long a tank of fuel lasts, so none of that is claimed here. What the video documents is the machine running under load on the customer’s own material.

The next useful update

The figures a buyer really wants are the ones only Duncan can supply: how much he gets through in an ordinary working day, how the cut length suits the stock he is feeding, and how the diesel engine holds up over a season. If he sends them, they will be added here — and not before.

Discuss your own cutting

Tell LUCTORC what you need to cut, roughly how much of it per day, and what power you have at the site — mains, three-phase, a tractor, or nothing at all. That is usually enough to point you at the right rating rather than the biggest one. See the 10 t/h chaff cutter, the full chaff cutter range from 3.8 to 15 t/h, or contact LUCTORC.

See the chaff cutter range