Yea we had a lot of rocks, mostly limestone, one farm we ran I called the "gravel pit" due to the amount of rocks far outnumbered the dirt. We did a lot of rock picking over the years but you never get them all no matter how much effort you put in, even a rock the size of an egg if run through the cutter head can total the entire head, spiders, knives, shear bar the whole deal.
As for v-raking in front of the chopper, we never raked anything in front of any chopper I ever ran, but we did own a v-rake and used it in front of my round baler, which in turn loosened up rocks to be picked up in later crops with the chopper to a certain extent. For a while we did some raking with regular bar rake but gave that up as well, mainly because we didn't have enough help to do everything but also because I could pick it up one windrow at a time with the chopper faster than we could rake it.
I ran all kinds of knife sharpeners over the years, I know all about the same number of strokes on each knife thing, but in the end with rock chips in some knives, it was far faster and simpler to do it with what I had set up, from start to finish I could sharpen the knives and set the shear bar in less than five minutes and be back in the seat of the chopper running full bore again and never shut down the cutter head once, we had quick set knife adjustments which sped up the process considerably. I liked all my knives to nick the bar in at least two spots and then tighten the bar down which allowed a few thousands clearance or less on the knife. With the same number of strokes using that particular sharpener it was almost impossible to get all the knives sharpened to have two spots nick on each knife and do it less than five minutes, I know I've done that several hundreds times before scraping the system and looking for a faster better method. I'd also use new knives with older ones to get as much life out of them as possible and sharpen out rock pits in some knives and reset them up to allow this to be done, we did it all the time and still could sharpen the knives in a matter of minutes after resetting some knives. I also carried spare knives in the cab and would replace and reset, re-sharpen right in the field between loads while waiting for a semi to come back, every once in a while I knew when they had to stop to check or feed cattle or eat or grab lunch and I used that time to do knife swapping in the field and touch up the cutter head so I had it down to minutes not hours, but new holland cutterheads were still nicer for any of that type of work as well, that and they were a lot tougher as far as spiders were concerned. I never ruined any spider on any new holland chopper I ever owned but ruined a lot of spiders in the queen over the years.
There were a lot of factors that sank both queens and fox, not just the 80"s, that just sped it along, the largest one in my area was dealer support and parts availability, which was way beyond terrible, that and they didn't have a full line up of things to sell like deere and new holland did, they only basically had choppers. When I quit and sold my queen they had the best source of parts of any chopper made, it came right from the company and I had it in less than a day, if I called before 5pm I had it in my hand by 9am the next day, every single time and the parts came out of kansas, an excellent bunch of guys to work with out there, I've been there many times myself, but in the day they didn't sell direct to the owner you had to go through a dealer, so if the dealer was worthless so was the parts availability, something they solved too late in the game, fox was worse and everyone knew it, that's why they didn't sell machines later in the game, their dealers put them under long before their products did and once the market share was lost the game was over, coupled with many other problems that got covered up by blaming the farm crisis instead.
I'll agree in their day both machines were ones to buy and run, they had their day in the sun but management mainly lost it for them both and sank them. Queen still has an excellent parts availability and support team behind them for what machines are left, they are now making aftermarket parts for deere and some others but last I knew it was limited but growing. I often told them they needed to make another run of self propelled choppers and make the updates needed and they told me they had considered it but no, there wasn't the numbers to compete with deere, clause,new holland, and krone, that and they needed a larger chopper than the biggest one they ever made, in todays market it was just too small and outdated, they even told me the same story I just wrote you about being slow to update and not a large enough product line to survive, they told me they had their day in the sun and now are content to make and sell parts to those last few machines left and some others that the parent companies have long forgot about as they are not current models anymore.
I sold my queen about 4 years ago and it was the hardest thing I ever had to part with, but sitting in the back of the shed collecting dust wasn't the answer either, I sold it to a young guy who I thought would take care of it and run it for many years by last year he went broke and sold out, I don't know where it went from there, my wife made me stay home from the sale because she knew I'd buy it back and bring it home again to stick in the shed, she was right, so I let it go. Every fall I think about chopping corn silage and how much fun I had doing it but now its just memories of years gone by and changes that needed to come to our lives. Now I've swapped out choppers for dozers and excavators and dozens of other toys to play with instead but its nice to sit back and remember how things were though, as you might have imagined I'd chat for days on choppers and what to do and not to do, what I've tried and what worked and what didn't work and how I should have done things instead of how I did do things.