It has long been known that in rectangular balers, severed crop material is picked up off the ground and packed into fakes and then fed into the path of a plunger. It is then fed into a baling chamber in which succeeding flakes of crop material are compressed and pushed through the chamber to produce a bale having dimensions that are set by the cress section of the baling chamber and by appropriate length controlling mechanisms. The flakes making up the hales are tied with one or more circumferential lengths of twine to keep the hale together after the bale is ejected from the bale forming chamber. Typically, a plurality of strands of twine are passed around laterally spaced portions of the hale according to the size of the chamber. The baling twine tensioning systems have developed over the years and generally are formed with an upper and lower twine supply which is fed to a system for tying knot between two lengths of twine at the beginning and the end of the bale. Over the years, these systems have been developed so that the correct amount of tension is provided, to securely hold the bale together. One of the key elements in such a system is a slack arm which takes up the slack during the knotting process. Previous systems have provided a torturous path around one of the pivotal shafts for mechanism involved in the knotting and twine severing operation. Such a path has resulted in long term issues with respect to twine life.
What is needed in the art therefore is a system in which the twine path in a tensioning system provides minimal wear to the twine.