The Moonshiner's Leghorns

[The Moonshiner]

Thanks for the link. I'll check into it.
Thanks for the pics. Thats super cool. And I think I have that exact cooler too. Lol maybe a hatcher will be next.
Love that your 10 year old built it. I have a little one helping me on mine. According to him hes the brains of the operation.
You still raising those Orps?
Even though I got out of them you can still stop by every now and again and see what I'm into now.

 

[Faraday40]

Thanks for the link. I'll check into it.
Thanks for the pics. Thats super cool. And I think I have that exact cooler too. Lol maybe a hatcher will be next.
Love that your 10 year old built it. I have a little one helping me on mine. According to him hes the brains of the operation.
You still raising those Orps?
Even though I got out of them you can still stop by every now and again and see what I'm into now.

Great

Yes, we're still into the English Orps .... and our daughter got into some useless chickens (aka seramas) My son has 2 Leghorns. They're just from hatchery eggs (the results from a preschool hatch), but can't really beat them for egg production.

 

[The Moonshiner]

Hatch day today.
We'll see how it goes. I was a day late moving eggs to hatcher and when I opened the incubator they were already hatching.
I run the incubators with low humidity and a turner so not ideal in the least for hatching. I use egg flats to move the eggs so I hurried and loaded them up and got them moved. I saw around 15 chicks in there yesterday so hopefully things didn't go too bad with shrink wrapping. I only had 20 something eggs so we'll see. These eggs spent a couple weeks in the same incubator as that bad hatch came out of a couple weeks ago. With these hatching 2 days early I suspect temps are running a little too high. Maybe thats what happened with the other batch.
Should get pics today.

 

[The Moonshiner]

Here's some behind the scenes.
Last week after several decent rains before we got between 8" and 9" in a couple days. We had heavy flooding. My property is on higher ground but when its bad it floods a circle all the around us.
Couple pics from a stones throw from my place.

In the top pic our road is on the right. Zoom in up the road.
Since the ground at my place was already saturated we got a lot of standing water quickly. I spent two days trying to keep pens from filling up.
Had 4 grow out pens completely cover in standing water and 4 more about half covered. The first day I just filled them up with wood chips trying to get above the water. The second day added more to stay above water and have some dry spots and added to several breeder pens that I couldn't get to the day before.
I try to clean brooders before they get bad so I save the chips to use in breeder pens or in our pig pens or for whatever use I can find. I went through 12 or 15 feed bags full of those and 22 or 23 feed bags full on new chips.
Thats a lot of chips and if they were store bought it would of been a lot of $$$.
So just a thought when you go big small things like a couple large thunderstorms can turn into a lot of work, worry and $$$ in a hurry.
Luckily I didn't lose any birds.

 

[The Moonshiner]

And while I'm at it. Heres some pics of my incubator project still in progress.
Here what I started with after stripping it down.

This is upside down. False top with fan installed.

Runners for false side to attach to. Some electrical getting under way. Vent hole at bottom. There's also a vent through the top.

Couple showing false top and false side.

More electrical, shelf brackets, lower fan and heating element installed.

Just a better view of fan and heating element.
The outlets are for the turners.

Test fitting couple shelves. Theyre tight. Thinking of cutting down some more and adding wood strips behind brackets on that side like I did on the other. Could squeeze 7 shelves in but think for now I'll go with 6 since it give a little more room in between and there's 6 outlets.

Still have to install thermostat and wire it to heating element and a plug.
Shelves are rough where cut so gonna take some time to smooth those out and need to decide if cutting them down more.
Still plenty more to do but I want to get testing soon. Thinking of maybe adding a light at some point and if need be something to adjust fan speeds. I have some plug in corded dimmer switches so that shouldn't be a big issue.

 

[Amer]

And while I'm at it. Heres some pics of my incubator project still in progress.
Here what I started with after stripping it down.
View attachment 2278557
This is upside down. False top with fan installed.
View attachment 2278560
Runners for false side to attach to. Some electrical getting under way. Vent hole at bottom. There's also a vent through the top.
View attachment 2278562
Couple showing false top and false side.
View attachment 2278563

View attachment 2278564
More electrical, shelf brackets, lower fan and heating element installed.
View attachment 2278566

View attachment 2278567
Just a better view of fan and heating element.
The outlets are for the turners.
View attachment 2278568
Test fitting couple shelves. Theyre tight. Thinking of cutting down some more and adding wood strips behind brackets on that side like I did on the other. Could squeeze 7 shelves in but think for now I'll go with 6 since it give a little more room in between and there's 6 outlets.
View attachment 2278569
Still have to install thermostat and wire it to heating element and a plug.
Shelves are rough where cut so gonna take some time to smooth those out and need to decide if cutting them down more.
Still plenty more to do but I want to get testing soon. Thinking of maybe adding a light at some point and if need be something to adjust fan speeds. I have some plug in corded dimmer switches so that shouldn't be a big issue.

Wow! That’s big! I didn’t realize it was a vending style cooler.

 

[The Moonshiner]

Wow! That’s big! I didn’t realize it was a vending style cooler.

Lol I think its small. It is a vending type but not a huge one.
Originally I was gonna use it as a hatcher and thats still my some day plan. I dream of having a walk in incubator so in a year or two I'm gonna make one and use this as the hatcher.
I picked this up at a garage sell for like $7 bucks. It was being sold as scrap metal and the guy thought he got a hella deal for the $7. I think I got the better end of that sell.

 

[The Moonshiner]

@TheBajan
Haven't quite got it finished yet but a few posts back are some pics in progress.

 

[TheBajan]

No I haven't researched. Lol I hate researching and reading in general. Now if someone had a good picture book id been all over it.
I had an old sportsman way back in the day and built a rip off of it once before to.
That's about all I know. This design is just winging it with what ran through my head and mostly trying to work with the cooler.
I'm not having any humidity control just using a pan of water and adding when it gets low.
My concern is even heat from top to bottom. The egg section part is about 17" x 18" and 35" top to bottom. Should have 6 or 7 shelves with turners so even heat through all those is probably gonna be an issue. IDK?
Just looking at a starting place for thermostat to get it wrapped up to get to the testing stage.

Your interior size is almost the same as mine. In our case, we have the heat coming down from the top and being pulled out from the bottom. Sounds like yours will be the opposite. Yes, even heat was a problem for us. We only have three levels in our but if we do it again, we will have four levels in the same size box. Anyway, we solved the problem with a simple air diffuser. We used a 1/4" piece of underlayment with channels cut into it and placed it under the lowest level. It slowed the air passing enough that our heat differential between the top level and the bottom level went from 4 1/2 degrees down to 1 degree. My test run I incubated 36 eggs evenly dispersed on all three levels. It worked. I finished a hatch this morning with a 75% hatch rate on shipped eggs so I'm happy with it's performance.

 

[Redhead Rae]

Here's some behind the scenes.
Last week after several decent rains before we got between 8" and 9" in a couple days. We had heavy flooding. My property is on higher ground but when its bad it floods a circle all the around us.
Couple pics from a stones throw from my place.
View attachment 2278539View attachment 2278540
In the top pic our road is on the right. Zoom in up the road.
Since the ground at my place was already saturated we got a lot of standing water quickly. I spent two days trying to keep pens from filling up.
Had 4 grow out pens completely cover in standing water and 4 more about half covered. The first day I just filled them up with wood chips trying to get above the water. The second day added more to stay above water and have some dry spots and added to several breeder pens that I couldn't get to the day before.
I try to clean brooders before they get bad so I save the chips to use in breeder pens or in our pig pens or for whatever use I can find. I went through 12 or 15 feed bags full of those and 22 or 23 feed bags full on new chips.
Thats a lot of chips and if they were store bought it would of been a lot of $$$.
So just a thought when you go big small things like a couple large thunderstorms can turn into a lot of work, worry and $$$ in a hurry.
Luckily I didn't lose any birds.

We had some crazy rain last week as well. My new layer paddock got flooded and my Cornish grow out pen (the carport thing) got whipped around and tried to float away. I don’t think I lost any birds. Our house was well out of the water.

One of the neighbors on our lane, while high and dry, has a different problem. The hillside is falling away 15 ft from his deck and threatening the house on the other side of the stream should another massive flood come through.