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Hi, my name is Mike. I'm a service technician
at our Bendersville store out here in Apple country.
Today, we're going to go over a little bit about the Turbo-mist sprayers,
which are a line of orchard sprayers that we sell.
They are made in Canada by a company called
Slimline Manufacturing.
This particular one is a 38-inch fan.
I say fan. It's actually a turbine-style sprayer
as opposed to your axial fan.
It's a PTO-driven and is not a self-driven sprayer.
It's a pull behind a standard orchard tractor.
We can do a little walk around here, show you some of the components.
Right up front here is your pressure gauge and regulator
that you can see from the tractor.
Here is your control box that you actually have in the tractor
to turn your left and right booms on and off,
to adjust your pressure
at your gauge as you're going along.
Move around.
We have some of the components.
This particular machine has electric valves for the booms.
You can also get them in pneumatic, hydraulic applications as well.
That would be these two here.
This third valve is actually your pressure regulating valve
for the overall pressure of the machine.
Down in here, we have a two-speed gearbox,
which is handy because if you don't have
such wide row spacing, it's helpful to run on low fan to save fuel.
If you need the extra oomph
to get your material up and on the trees, then you have that high fan option.
The pump is on the other side.
When we go around, we'll see that there.
This is your actual turbine housing.
When I say "turbine," it's a compressor.
It's not an axial fan,
meaning that it takes on
twice as much air as it will put out.
The air coming out is of a higher CFM and volume
than you would get with a standard axial fan sprayer.
It also lends to a nice balance out both sides
being that it is a compressed form of air.
When it comes to moving air with anything,
whether it'd be a Shop-Vac, a leaf blower, a CFM,
is more important by far than mile per hour,
the amount of air you're moving,
you really get that with this compressor style.
This is what's called an orchard head.
Basically, you have two sides. They look similar either side.
The air comes out.
There's a row of nozzles that you can adjust
to a different amount of spray material.
Basically, your lower nozzles would be of a lesser amount
because you're spraying the trunks.
As you move to the top, you need more material
to penetrate out into the canopy
of whatever you're spraying,
whether it be peaches, apples, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
They have a really good program on the Turbo-mist website
to tune these to pretty much down to the inch of your specific needs,
your tree spacing,
mile per hour of your tractor,
the amount you want to put on per acre.
There's a lot of variables
that can really get that dialed in and make for a real precision
application of your products
so that you're not wasting money on lost product and material.
Both of these orchard heads,
they have a T-handle.
You can tilt them out or up
depending on the height of the canopy that you're spraying.
New trees, young trees basically.
As we come around, similar setup.
Both booms do have a self-flushing valve on the bottom,
which is a nice feature.
It's a self-flushing valve --
It's a self-flushing filter, I should say,
that helps keep the breeze from clogging your nozzles.
It's one of the nicer features of this machine.
As we come around,
you can really see. Here's your two-speed gearbox.
You have your low and high.
Right now, I have it in high.
Low would be the opposite direction.
This is your [?] four-piston pump.
It is a piston pump
as opposed to some other sprayers running centrifugal pump.
The benefits being, this pump can be run dry for a very short period obviously.
Whereas a centrifugal pump,
you don't want to run them dry ever.
They'll burn up rather quickly.
This pump will pull water
without being underneath the level of the material in the tank.
Whereas a centrifugal pump, you need your water level above it to get started.
We've had really good luck with these pumps.
Service intervals have been about two years.
That's just for basic maintenance.
They generally tend to last a good long time.
They've been a good pump for us.
There's several, several, several options and combinations you can get
on a Turbo-mist sprayer.
These are some of the more basic ones.
Like I think I said at the beginning, this is a 38P.
This is the biggest fan that they actually make
in an orchard sprayer.
You can get all kinds of different greasing accessories,
steps, different jack's, things of that nature.
There really is pretty much.
If you can dream it, they can put it on there for you.
They're very good at custom building as well.
This is our Turbo-mist 38P sprayer.
I'm going to show you guys what it looks like when we turn the booms on,
show you a little bit about the pressure regulation from the box.
Here's both booms.
You can see it really pushes the product up and into the canopy well.
You can alternate as quickly as the flip of the switch
when you change rows.
Just a switch from the cab of the tractor.
Now, you have your gauge right here.
As you're going along with both booms open,
if you would need to make a fine adjustment to that gauge,
you have that ability here,
to change your pressure,
to add more or less product.
As you can see,
it blows it way up into the canopy.
That concludes a little brief overview of the Turbo-mist sprayers
that we sell here at Messick's.
If you have any more questions,
please feel free to give us a call at
800-222-3373
or visit us at messicks.com.
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