50 CHICKEN chicken tractor!! Pics and Progress!

[perchie.girl]

My son went to take the garbage out the other night made three trips out through the garage to the side yard to load the trash cans. On his way in he realized he had been stepping over a baby rattle snake. It only had one button. There is a nick name for the area at the end of our street.... "rattlesnake hill" Ours get about that long too, and Beefy. Glad you and your mighty hunter got your game without injury.... LOL.

The deal with pulley Sheaves (the part you tried to use PVC for) they use a bearing of sorts. It can be simple as an Oil impregnated brass sleeve bearing, or full on roller bearings inside of the sheave which has a groove for rope. Each Sheave must be able to move independently for efficient operation, so the whole mechanism is going to be kind of loosey goosey.

To tighten it up involves snap rings or even pressure washers designed to hold the hub of a roller bearing in compression Yet keep the sheaves from touching each other.....

If you have some old skateboards those wheels would make excellent sheave centers(inside the pvc). And the half inch or so diameter bolt that goes through the skateboard board wheels is more than strong enough to handle the force of the work.

Another solution would be figure out a way to lift the coop first with a built in lever or even a carjack mounted upside down thus allowing you to drop the wheels and lock them in place.

deb

 

[colburg]

GOING CRAZY!!

With crazy wheels. In order for this thing to ride on 4 wheels, the front 2 need to be able to swivel. This can be done with a Colby style front end where the tires are connected with a tie rod, connected to a swivel toungue. Or, it can be done with crazy wheels. This idea comes from a 4-row shredder.

Oh, BTW. If you're wondering about the pulleys and lifting the rear wheels, that's been put on hold cause I'm too frustrated with too many failures. I want to make some good progress and get back on track.

Alright, well start with a frame for the tire, then weld on a piece of pipe. Another pipe that just slides over the one shown below is how it swivels.


Here's the final product so that it can lift and let the tractor down. Sheesh, 4 hours of work for that? Oh well, it looks GOOOOOD, to me anyway.


I forgot to get a picture of it installed. But, I got it on, welded the lever on the shaft. One more time... AAAANNND Lift. Lever's going up. Tires not moving. Lever's still going up. Tire stil not moving. What is going on? Lift again and twist off the lever. Actually, I hadn't welded it on that well so that's ok. I unbolted the tire and crazy wheel assembly and found what was wrong.

By now I've had three days and many hours of nothing but failures and I was ticked. The only thin that saved the tractor from getting beat was chugging a couple beers and walking around the orchard. I got the grinder with a cutting wheel and thought, "NOPE, I'm gonna torch this thing to pieces." Torched here and there, actually did a little grinding to save a few pieces.

It wasn't until after "disassembly" that I remembered to get some pics.

The angle iron I used that the swivel rested on was apparently not heavy enough. I thought surely 2x2x3/16 would be ok, but I was wrong. AGAIN.


I was also surprised by this. It used to be perfectly round.



A couple more beers and I calmed down. Did some work on the expanded metal that needed welded and gave up on all tires and lifting for the day.

Gonna try it again today. a little better bracing, some good pulleys, but first a trip to the convenience store. I drank all my beer yesterday and I will need some more for either a celebration or to keep me from beating the tractor. Plus my dad's on his way over to help. I might oughta pick up some gin too. Could be a fun day afterall.

 

[debir1966]

Keep your chin up! To my thinking, if you decide that building chicken tractors is not your thing, you can always take up writing You have put a smile on my face every post! And now I have my husband reading and smiling too.

 

[colburg]

My son went to take the garbage out the other night made three trips out through the garage to the side yard to load the trash cans. On his way in he realized he had been stepping over a baby rattle snake. It only had one button. There is a nick name for the area at the end of our street.... "rattlesnake hill" Ours get about that long too, and Beefy. Glad you and your mighty hunter got your game without injury.... LOL.

The deal with pulley Sheaves (the part you tried to use PVC for) they use a bearing of sorts. It can be simple as an Oil impregnated brass sleeve bearing, or full on roller bearings inside of the sheave which has a groove for rope. Each Sheave must be able to move independently for efficient operation, so the whole mechanism is going to be kind of loosey goosey.

To tighten it up involves snap rings or even pressure washers designed to hold the hub of a roller bearing in compression Yet keep the sheaves from touching each other.....

If you have some old skateboards those wheels would make excellent sheave centers(inside the pvc). And the half inch or so diameter bolt that goes through the skateboard board wheels is more than strong enough to handle the force of the work.

Another solution would be figure out a way to lift the coop first with a built in lever or even a carjack mounted upside down thus allowing you to drop the wheels and lock them in place.

deb

I like the idea of the skate board wheels, but we have no skateboards or wheels at our place. I was hoping that my homemade pulleys would be quick and cheap. Well, they were cheap, and kinda quick but I seem to have forgotten about the part where I needed them to work. I have a few leftover bearings from another project, but I would need some more of them and at $10ea, why not buy pulleys already built. Thursday and Friday your harbor freight pulleys were looking mighty good. My dad had a good idea while he was on his way over on Saturday. He was bringing over some nice pulleys of his combines that were no longer working and ran by Lowes to give one more idea a shot.

One more broken weld, moving one of the boards and 2 full days of both of us working and we think we have a working solution. It's actually pretty slick, lifting 2 tires at once.

I'm not going to reveal what it is until I have picks to go with it.

 

[colburg]

Keep your chin up! To my thinking, if you decide that building chicken tractors is not your thing, you can always take up writing You have put a smile on my face every post! And now I have my husband reading and smiling too.

Thanks debir, It only took a 6-pack to get my chin back up. Actually got pretty motivated the last two days and had a little extra giddy in my giddy-up yesterday. I'll post maybe tomorrow, with some good pics on why.

The thing with building the chicken tractor, or anything for that matter, is that the first design kicks your butt. You get everything worked out, test it for a while, gain some confidence in it, then your ready for round number two.

Tractor number 2 may have some dimension changes, sequencing switches, etc. It should come out cheaper and faster. Tractor #3 will be built in record time, with little waste of materials and it'll feel great to get it done. Then, you're all done. All that knowledge, time, thought that went into the process is no longer needed. You could crank them out at factory production speed with very high confidence, Buuuutttt, it's no longer needed. Oh yeah, random thought to myself, I still need to do the nesting boxes sometime within the next 15 weeks. I'll post these as well becuase I think I have some cool ideas for the nests and egg collection.

Anyway, long rant short, I shall perservere through this build and take a break. I need to see how the daytime predator situation plays out, then something along the lines of foulplay's hen house may be in order. I'm already eyeing one of my neighbors broken trucks that have been on that property for years to use for the frame. That oughta make for some more good writing.

The thing about the writing is, I have to be interested. The last time I wrote more than a paragraph was in college about 5 years ago. The only thing I've had interest in writing down since then was grocery lists. The only reason I wrote those down is because my wife probably would have started beating me long ago if I forgot all of her stuff the way I used to forget mine. And I got so many good ideas off of BYC(both before and after I started posting, thanks perchie), that I felt I should pitch back in and hopefully help out others, by convincing them not to think like a farmer and build such a huge tractor with a time crunch. Our 49 little chicks are 6 weeks old on Wednesday, their brooder is getting kinda cramped.

On that note, we were having a philosophical conversation with our 4 year old daughter on "When does a chick become a chicken?" My first answer was when they started losing their baby feathers a while back. She said "No daaaaaad, they're still chicks." How about when they start laying eggs? "No daaaaad, that's not when." Does anyone else have any ideas of when a chick becomes a chicken? My next answer is going to be when their pecks start to hurt when they're eating out of your hand, maybe that's the right answer.

 

[ailurophile23]

In my experience, chicks become chickens when you finally get their coop done and move them out of the house!

 

[debir1966]

We are a cart-before-the-horse type of family too We got chicks - THEN started the chicken coop LOL. We had the same problems of chicks outgrowing their brooder box, living in the house too long, shoved into temporary outside brooders (most in a small trailer with chicken wire over the top and some in our horse trailer LOL), and FINALLY we got the coop done when they were 8 1/2 weeks old! And we still do not have the run built and we have to have a covered run area for this winter... because chicken math took over my brain and I have too many chickens for the size coop we built (bigger is always better!).

I think we are just going to make a covered hoop run for this winter then I can use it for a grow-out pen/meat chicken coop next year (yes, we may actually have something accomplished BEFORE it is actually needed).

 

[colburg]

In my experience, chicks become chickens when you finally get their coop done and move them out of the house!

NNOO chickens in the house. We started ours outside from day 1.

We are a cart-before-the-horse type of family too We got chicks - THEN started the chicken coop LOL. We had the same problems of chicks outgrowing their brooder box, living in the house too long, shoved into temporary outside brooders (most in a small trailer with chicken wire over the top and some in our horse trailer LOL), and FINALLY we got the coop done when they were 8 1/2 weeks old! And we still do not have the run built and we have to have a covered run area for this winter... because chicken math took over my brain and I have too many chickens for the size coop we built (bigger is always better!).

I think we are just going to make a covered hoop run for this winter then I can use it for a grow-out pen/meat chicken coop next year (yes, we may actually have something accomplished BEFORE it is actually needed).

I had to order the chicks beforehand because the only way I'd have time to do build the coop, is if there's a time crunch. If I hadn't ordered them, I might have started it, but then I would have quickly switch over to getting all my equipment ready for harvest. This little cold snap has put me into high gear.

As far as chicken math goes, my wife helped slow me down. I threw out the 75-100 chickens to start with. She brought it back down to 25, then we agreed on 50 because there were a few breeds she wanted as well. I'm SOOO glad we didn't go for the 100.

 

[colburg]

BEEEEEFCAAAAAAKE!!!!(Southpark)

That's all I could think of when I was starting to write this, so I threw it in for fun.

Remeber this?


It now looks like this. HAHAHAHAHAHA, take that you puny piece of pipe that can't handle the near infinite amount of torque I put on you.


Extra bracing on the top, bottom, and both sides.


And, remember this? 2x2x3/16 angle iron


Is now 3x3x3/8 angle iron. About 6 times as heavy and 90 times stronger.(That's a guess, I'm too lazy to look it up in a steel strength book.)


Here's the new assembly. I also added a peice of angle iron to beef up the lever. That lever is sprinkler pipe and it's pretty strong, but it still bends just a little when lifting so I beefed it up before it went catastrophic on me. Archimedes may now call upon this lever to move the world.(It may not be long enough, but at least it won' break.)

 

[colburg]

Flight of the CHICKEN...Tractor.

Houston, we have liftoff.

Flying the coop.. literally.

I wish I had the time to do a video with "Cry of the Valkyrie" in the background.

I've had a couple of days to be excited that something worked. While building the rest of the wheel setups my mind switched from one title to the next. There's been about a dozen of them rolling around up there.



Well, it doesn't really fly, it just kinda hovers over the ground. 19 inches of hover in the front, 16 inches in the back to be exact.

How does it hover you ask? On 4 tires, silly.
How do the 4 tires lift the tractor? By rotating about shafts connected to levers.
How do the lever rotate the shafts? By being pulled with cables.
How are the cables pulled? With a boat winch.

I hope you weren't expecting something cool, like homemade pulleys that don't work, or anti-gravitational space beam. I didn't even get them somewhere cool like the junkyard or my scrap pile. There were 2 in the whole town. One at Lowes for $37 that came with a two strap and lifts 1,500 pounds. The other from TSC for $45 that had no cable, strap, or velcro, and lifts 1,400 pounds. WHAT THE????? Oh well, the one from Lowes worked and.... I'm getting tired and lazy at this point. Plus, my dad bought them while he was in town

.

Pic of crazy wheel in UP position.


Rear wheels in UP position. They look different because the first one(on the left) was a learning setup. The second one was done right.


Another view from the front looking in.


I was even able to turn the wheels by pushing on the frame and I haven't put grease in their yet.





I could move the whole thing by hand just by pushing on the back frame without grease in the wheels. I sure hope I remember to grease everything.

Hopefully it'll make a test run through the orchard, get pushed by my wife, and take up residence in the pasture after work today. Gotta make the pull tongue and tidy some stuff up first. Oh yeah, I stole my cross cables so I could test the winches. Need to get some more of that too. Need a couple small braces.... Maybe today is too optimistic.

Oh well,