Plans for Salatin style dolly?

[bigredfeather]

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I would think the handle is bent the wrong way on an appliance dolly. It wouldn't lay flat and it would drag the ground making it harder to move. If only the verticle members are running on the ground, it should glide right along. I could be wrong.

 

[Buster52]

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Doesn't work. Regular dollies have the wheels in the wrong place and so lift the bottom of the tractor way to high off the ground, thus letting the birds out.

 

[alicefelldown]

He describes how to make the dolly pretty well in his book Pastured Poultry Profits (which, of course, I don't have with me!)

Check your local library?

 

[Bossroo]

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I would think the handle is bent the wrong way on an appliance dolly. It wouldn't lay flat and it would drag the ground making it harder to move. If only the verticle members are running on the ground, it should glide right along. I could be wrong.

My 2 sons and I have used a small dolly purchased from Home Depot to get from 50 to up to 400 (moss and lichen covered ) pound boulders dug out halfway out of the ground from the Sierra Nevada Mountains up,down, sideways and along the rocky ground, load them into a 3/4 ton pickup using 2-2 x 6's as a ramp and then position them for retaining walls up to 3 1/2' high x 47' long along 2 sides of the house. As well as along the 120 foot driveway and beside it and the creekside and landscaping around/ next to 72 Redwood trees on my 2 acres of grounds around our house. Took about 10 months, 117 trips and aproximately 100 tons in all. We also used it to move and position 48 - 8' high x 12' wide all steel side panels and 48- 26" x 30 foot steel roof panels , each by 20-70 feet, to build my Mare Motel barn. So I would hazard to guess that lifting one end of a chicken tractor by 2 inches and moving it about 8 to 10 feet that one would work for a chicken tractor as well.

 

[Buster52]

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It is fairly obvious you have no clue how either the Salatin dolly or the tractor works. It is a one person system. You put the dolly under one end of the tractor and lay it down, then go to the other end and pull the tractor forward. The dolly acts as a set of wheels, not as a lift. A standard dolly would lift it way too high to accomplish that.

The dolly allows you to have one set of wheels for multiple tractors.

 

[Bossroo]

Quite simple actually when I put my mind to it ... use my small red dolly to lift one end of the tractor by 2" ( since the center of the wheels of the dolly are only 2" from the gound) than pull it dragging the back end to it's destination.

 

[Buster52]

With all the attendant drag, when it is much easier to pull with wheels on the other side.

For a guy who likes doing everything the easy way, that's kind of the hard way around. Why bother with a dolly at all?

 

[scubaforlife]

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Because CXs can be lazy and if you roll the pen over the back of one it can kill it. With the dolly the bird just pops out the back and you can pick it up.

I built a little chicken-prod on the back so they want to walk forward.

 

[Buster52]

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Because CXs can be lazy and if you roll the pen over the back of one it can kill it. With the dolly the bird just pops out the back and you can pick it up.

Not if you are using the dolly in the front, the way Bossroo is suggesting.

It was a rhetorical question, actually. I think using either a Salatin dolly or wheels on the back of each tractor is the way to go.

 

[Bossroo]

If I used my little red dolly, I could lift one end of the tractor by 2 inches (the dolly is now at about a 45* angle) quite easily, then while holding onto the handle I can then back up which results in moving said tractor to fresh grass with much less effort than if I just dragged the whole thing. Aso, by pulling backwards fairly slowly, the chickens atack the newly exposed grass, or any hapless bug, in the front which minimizes any chicken from getting hurt or crushed by the back end.

This way, I don't have to lift the opposite end of the tractor in order to move it, so it would save my aching back too.