There were quite a few Gleaners in this area, going back a few years, bit it is all red and green now, with the odd Cat and New Holland. I think the dealer had a lot to do with the number of Gleaners around but I am not quite sure what problems they had with them.
RnR.
They are a high maintenance machine once they get a few hours on them and have to be rebuild on a regular basis in order to be reliable.
Running them at their maximum capacity puts a lot of strain on the bearings and belts.
As an example I helped rebuild a N7 and it was very reliable for a couple of seasons, then the boss bought a Deutz-Allis R62 (complete with self burning V8) and I got the job as full time pilot of the N7 but spend a fair bit of time repairing it, virtually rebuilding during the harvest. It even blew the main drive belt to the rotor, that made a mess, including bending the main shaft. However I was not operating it at the time, it was towards the end of harvest and I gave one of the other workers some seat time. Of course I still coped the blame, along the lines of "if you where driving that machine, you would have picked up on the fault before it got real bad", perhaps who knows? Which reminds me of another time, I just got finished harvesting 1000 acres of peas (which was a horrible job) and switched over to wheat (including increasing the rotor speed from about 450rpm to 700 rpm), anyway can't remember why but the boss jumps in the and fires it up, of course there is a real bad vibration going through the machine and the boss asks me how long that's been there, I tell him that's new. So we check everything and I keep telling him that is definatley a new vibration, finally we put the rotor gear box back in low gear and the vibration is gone. Turns out the pea dust had build up on the rotor bars and increasing the rpm made the machine shake, after cleaning the dust off the bars the vibration was gone and the N7 was as smooth as it usually was.
Anyway the rotary Gleaners have a reputation for being whizz-bang machines, they'll whizz up the crop and then go bang because people don't maintain them as well as they should.