KRONE built its first
KRONE built its first round baler in 1977. Martin Grimm, head of marketing and sales promotion since 1972, still remembers how it all started. “Bernard Krone, our two new constructors Wilhelm Ahler and Hubert Kreienbaum, and I attended a demonstration of belt driven balers. While we were watching, out there on the field, Wilhelm Ahler said suddenly, ‘I’ve got a completely different idea’. He explained briefly what he had in mind and Bernard Krone simply told him ‘Give it a go!’ Ahler’s idea was to adopt the principle of the circulating chain elevator from the Optimat manure spreader. The first field test showed that the KR 180 actually worked. The then head of engineering, Hubert Kreienbaum, remembers, “The only criticism was because of its loudness. With the first machine, the chain elevator was on the outside of the metal casing. But the noise was so intense that as a basic design principal, it was unacceptable. Although otherwise it worked well.” Bernard Krone instructed them to, “Build five of them immediately.” The original intention was to use these five demonstration models as a means of arousing interest in Ahlers endless slat conveyor design, in the hope they could sell the patent to another company. However, since nobody appeared too interested, Bernard Krone decided without much ado, “So we’ll just build our round balers ourselves.” Wilhelm Ahler continued with the technical development of the KR 180’s internal features, including a completely enclosed bale chamber. The circulating conveyor for the transportation of straw, hay and silage inside the chamber was now isolated from the metal casing which meant much less noise was generated than with the prototype. The effectiveness of the chain and slats guaranteed high bale density. And so the KR 180 entered serial production. In 1978, Martin Grimm and his team set out on a sales promotion tour of Germany, which proved to be a great success, and the Krone baler met with great approval. The greatest importers were the Swedes and Finns and also the Italians. However the latter were also the most brazen copiers. Wilhelm Ahler was particularly annoyed to find 13 different copies in use at the same time, the majority in Italy. On one occasion, I saw a copy in a field in Italy and climbed over the fence to take some photographs. They had copied our KR 180 down to the last detail. Suddenly, the owner came up to me, angrily shouting something in Italian. I held out my business card yelled back, “IO constructeuro do KRONE”, which roughly means “I am the KRONE engineer”. After that he shut up. From then on KRONE have been constantly updating their round baler models and have been major innovators in this sector with products such as Ultima, the worlds first non-stop baler wrapper. The Bellima round baler NovoGrip has been a great addition to KRONE round balers. The robust and endless rubber fabric belts with metal slats offer an ideal system to achieve highest densities in straw, hay and silage. The system relies on an extremely high belt tension that applies the drive power to the bale. 10 The 2018 KRONE Comprima combines all that is great about the last 40 years of KRONE round balers into one productive and quality package. Optimat manure spreader
The KRONE Round Baler Story KR 180 Round Baler Bellima Round Baler 11
