The RMI Tyre Tosser, available from Strautmann Hopkins, is a 7m hydraulic chain that fires 35 tyres onto a silage stack
Let’s be honest: there are plenty of character-building jobs on a dairy farm. Simply getting up before the crack of dawn every day is right up there, or fixing a fence line in horizontal Southland sleet also springs to mind. But they all pale in comparison to the absolute pinnacle of agricultural misery – covering the silage stack.
If there’s one job in the agricultural calendar that guarantees a face full of stagnant rainwater, a sore back, and a test of your most colourful vocabulary and patience, it’s throwing tyres onto a silage stack.
We’ve all been there. It’s late February, the sun is blistering, the contractor has just left after packing a mountain of green gold, and like clockwork (the farming equivalent of the Freemantle doctor if you will), comes a rising wind, just in time for you to wrestle an oversized sheet of black polythene – and then come the tyres. Thousands of tyres, each one needing to make its way up a 45-degree face. Heavy, water-logged, steel-belted radial tyres filled with stagnant water, earwigs, and disappointment. You spend the next three hours throwing them into a human chain, ruining your back, and splashing yourself with black tyre slime.
Enter the RMI Tyre Tosser, an attachment designed to take the manual misery out of sealing pits. Built tough like the RMI implements you know and love, this simple piece of clever engineering fits onto your tractor or telehandler’s pallet forks and is a beautiful thing people.
The Nuts and Bolts
At first glance, the Tyre Tosser looks like an oversized chainsaw and it many ways it is just that. The steel is thick, the grease nipples are all easily accessible from ground level, and the frame features a hot-dip galvanised finish to withstand the highly corrosive environment of fermenting forage.
At 7m in length it has the capacity for 35 car tyres, while the notched chain and a robust Parker TG0335 hydraulic motor deliver maximum heave. There are also no overly complex electronics or sensitive sensors here to get upset by silage juice or green tyre slime. It’s pure hydraulic and mechanical simplicity, which is exactly what you want when working around a pit.
The Loading
Simply have someone loading the chain while you have it slowly engaged in reverse – or if you have your tyres cleverly stacked in a way that you can load them with your own 7m sward – then all power to ya. The little tunnel at the fork end of the machine is reminiscent of the ball-spitty-outy machine at the local 10-pin bowling alley, where I can only assume the main witchcraft happens. Nett result, the Tyre Tosser is quickly fully laden with the 35 tyres and onto the main party piece which is…
The Launch Mechanism
Once you position your loader at the base or side of the stack, the high-torque, hydraulically driven chain takes over. With a flick of the tractor’s third-service spool, it flings the tyres accurately up onto the stack in a way that resembles a slinky rather than a free-for-all which best describes the approach of your standard bucket grab.
Think of the cover people!
Operating it is incredibly intuitive. You load, lift, point, and shoot. Instead of dragging tyres up a slippery plastic cover and risking a tear that lets oxygen ruin your top layer of feed, you can sit in a quiet, air-conditioned cab, listen to the radio, and spot-place tyres exactly where they are needed.
Is the Tyre Tosser a luxury?
If you only make one pit a year, yes. But if you’re managing a large-scale dairy unit or running a busy agricultural contracting outfit, this machine is an absolute gamechanger – your happy customers await.
Verdict
You know the drill: rains coming, wind has picked up which usually results in a panicked call to the neighbours or bribing the local teenagers with pizza, accompanied by an inevitable trip to the chiropractor the following morning.
Because the machine handles the heavy lifting, the person on the stack is relegated to a ‘spotter’ role – simply nudging the tyres into a tight, interlocking matrix to create that perfect anaerobic seal using a fraction of the manpower. Truly happy days people, truly happy days.
Available in New Zealand from Strautmann Hopkins, there’s no doubt the RMI Tyre Tosser is designed to get the job done.
RMI Tyre Tosser specifications
| Length | 7m |
|---|---|
| Tyre capacity | 35 standard car tyres |
| Machine weight (empty) | 330kg |
| Attachment | Standard 140mm x 70mm pallet fork, 1200mm long |
| Coupling size | ½” QRC |
| Hydraulic flow | Parker TG0335 114L/min max flow, 76L/min continuous |
