The Old Folks Home

[ronott1]

that thread is a hot mess. We are several newbies at incubation, with a newly designed bator. People are having issues with temp spikes. The 9300 has a weired temp/humidity sensor that moves around alot. I plan to install a computer fan next hatch and see if it helps. It would be great if a hatching guru would stop by and help us out. But anyways; congrats on getting a bator and good luck with the ducks.

Make sure the fan blows air into the incubator.

 

[Bunnylady]

Btw: what color eggs do silkies and polish lay

Polish lay white eggs and silkies lay eggs that are sort of cream-colored. Chickens have a sort of "ear" flap on the side of their faces; that is often a good indicator of the egg color. Birds with white ones usually lay white eggs, those with red usually lay brown eggs. On Silkies, they are electric blue; not sure what that means but what else would you expect from a chicken with fur?

 

[ronott1]

Polish lay white eggs and silkies lay eggs that are sort of cream-colored. Chickens have a sort of "ear" flap on the side of their faces; that is often a good indicator of the egg color. Birds with white ones usually lay white eggs, those with red usually lay brown eggs. On Silkies, they are electric blue; not sure what that means but what else would you expect from a chicken with fur?

The ear color only works for certain American breeds. Spanish not at all!

 

[bamadude]

Make sure the fan blows air into the incubator.

on this lg 9300 the heating element is 4"x4" square positioned off center toward the north end. I noticed that the eggs directly under the element hatched early. The eggs on the far south end were either late or didnt hatch. The temp varies 2-4 degrees from the north end to the south end. I was hoping to just wrap a computer fan with screen and lay it inside somewhere. Idk if it would help or not.

 

[ronott1]

on this lg 9300 the heating element is 4"x4" square positioned off center toward the north end. I noticed that the eggs directly under the element hatched early. The eggs on the far south end were either late or didnt hatch. The temp varies 2-4 degrees from the north end to the south end. I was hoping to just wrap a computer fan with screen and lay it inside somewhere. Idk if it would help or not.

The fan helps a bunch. It hurts the hatch if the air is pulled from the bottom to the top. The thermostat will not work correctly and messes it all up.

Even with the fan, move the eggs to different spots every couple of days.

 

[ChickenCanoe]

That's how you buy land in La in a rural setting. Not sub division. From the middle of the road. It's the way that it is surveyed and the way that the court house has it. I don't know of any other kind. Out of the city limits.

I get that. The field was actually part of my property prior to my buying it. That made it a 5 acre parcel (to the middle of the road) Then it was subdivided by pushing a zoning variance through city council that allowed it to become an 8 lot subdivision. Actually my house would have been lot 1 of a 9 lot subdivision.
I'm just thinking that a potential buyer may think they could build 4 houses there, only to learn later that the zoning would preclude that because the house couldn't sit in the middle of the road. Not to mention that the closest sewer is across the road and 250' down a side street. Whoever develops it would have to foot the bill to tie all the lots together go under the major road to tie into the sewer. No wonder it hasn't been sold.
I wanted to buy it when I first moved in so I could have more ground and the guy wanted 85k. I asked him why so high. He said cause he had a lot of engineering work in it.
All he did was have it surveyed and drew a bunch of lines on the plat. It was still just raw land with a few sinkholes. No electricity, no natural gas, no water, no phone.
About 6 years later, I inquired about it again, thinking the price had come down. He was now asking 125k. Then he sold it to another speculator. They tried to cut it up into smaller lots to make it a 15 lot subdivision. It had to go through an open city council meeting for the zoning change. All property owners within a certain distance had to be informed about the hearing. The city sent out 2 notices and then put a courtesy notice in everyone's mailbox the day of the hearing. Not one of the neighbors, nor I had ever received one of those notices. That tells me, someone went around and pulled them out of the mailboxes. So no one knew of the meeting but luckily the handful of residents there voiced against it and it was voted down. Thankfully. So I still have an open field next to me rather than 15 houses.

Yes, I visit this site but don't post much. Hard to keep up with you all. I think my favorite is the gasconade in the fall. But I do like the currant on week days

The Eleven Point and North Fork are incredible too.

Well, I don't know. That woman looking back at me isn't the happy, bubbly girl from my 20's. I don't even have a happy face, I look like a sour puss all the time. I try looking in the mirror and smiling to soften my look but it doesn't look right. I know that when I do smile at people, it feels like I am smiling bigger than I really am, according to the mirror. LOL

No happy face here either. A friend calls me that old curmudgeon farmer dude.

I completely agree. I have had testing and it is on the low side of normal but still normal. In another group I found out there is another test, better but more expensive that will give a truer reading of you thyroid hormone levels but drs won't give it if they can avoid it and if there is something wrong with your thyroid that they find with the regular test, they figure they don't need to give the more expensive one. I am sure that if most drs would give the more expensive test, they'd find out more people have low thyroid than they want to believe.

The only thing testing has ever found on me is low blood pressure. I attribute that to remaining calm.

I haven't had any tests done in a long time though.

Well I did it.... I bought a bator today! I decided that for a little more money I could buy what I wanted and save myself the hassle of building one. So it's all set up and has been running for 7 hours,the temps are are holding steady but the humidity is way high. I have taken almost all the water out so once it levels out the duck eggs go in. We are all very excited to see what happens!!

Smart move. Good luck.
I considered saving up but wanted something that could hatch a lot of anything. I would never have been able to afford the type of cabinet I wanted so I built from a lot of spare materials I had around here and a few cherry picked things I purchased. It's still a work in progress but with the current setup it will hold 130 eggs in the incubator and 50 in the hatcher tray. If I redesign the turner system, It could hold about 250 eggs but I may never need for it to do that so it works for what I need now.

Bamadude I just found your thread! I bought a step below bator like yours. I didn't get the turner kit though

You can get the turner down the road.

Oh, I found this cabinet, looks like a printer cabinet. It's very heavy and it already has a fan in it venting holes and 3 shelves. I think it would make a wonderful incubator but they wanted $50 for it and it would still need some tweaking to make it into an incubator. If they had wanted half that price, I would have bought it. I don't really need it, I have 2 LG incubators but it would have made a really nice incubator.

Sounds like a nice deal. I probably would have bought it.

If you are building your own incubator, do not use light bulbs and water heater thermostats.

Incubator warehouse has improved their kits for this year and something like that is better.

I have seen too many try to use light bulbs and bad thermostats and then wonder why the egg all die.

I replaced all the light bulbs with metal heat elements when I realized the constant cycling would dramatically shorten the life of the incandescent lamps and it would eventually fail mid incubation.
There are very precise thermostats but one has to do a lot of research as well as trial and error when building one's own.

The coop is an 8x8 attached to a shed 8x16. Soooooo, the number of birds that fit in there, depends on how you like your density. In the winter the shed connects to the greenhouse which is 8x16, if you want to count that too in the covered square feet. There are runs, but I don't tend to count the square feet of the runs, since they don't use the entire run when it gets nasty cold and windy, or lots of snow.

I prefer closer to 10 square feet per bird of covered space (and I count all three buildings), but 8 is my minimum. So 40 birds is the absolute maximum that I should have.....and I have more than that right now. But, I don't have them all in the coop and shed right now either (greenhouse is still growing plants). I have one big group still growing up in my bigger chicken tractor, and three hens in my vegetable garden.

Very well said and a good plan.

I have a bit of a cooking philosophy which battles against using pre-made mixes when I'm cooking, I prefer to know exactly what I'm putting into the food....

Same here. It's kind of a European philosophy. My wife continues to use some premixes but I refuse. Everything I cook is from scratch and all real food.

...
Zen is about being here and now or in the present... I really need more of that right now. But as a writer and sometimes artist its a place where there are no limits... One time I decorated a walkign stick with dots. patterns of acryilic dots in various colors. Didnt have a brush to suit me... so I took one of my squishy Albuterol Ampules and filled it with paint... I spent days on it... Dot dot dotting.

Sculpture with found objects is my next endeavor one day. I have a couple of things I want to do that may be marketable...
...

Zen to us all.
When I retired, I had lots of plans to improve my quality of life. I was going to learn glass blowing - still on the back burner (pun intended). We have a place called the Third Degree glass factory that has classes and offers time in the kiln and studio.
I also wanted to become a stone sculptor. The plan was to go to Italy and study there. I was about to make arrangements when the Missouri Botanical Garden brought a couple of master sculptors from Zimbabwe to St. Louis to give classes all summer. They allowed no power tools. All work had to be with hand tools and that is exactly what I wanted. Bonus!! No travel or housing expenses. I was in their first class and proud of my work.
I'm planning on building a small studio here. To me, stone sculpture is the bees knees of art.

thats too funny. I will always call them my wifes chickens. ...

I knew that was your plan.

 

[Wisher1000]

Quote:
When I retired, I had lots of plans to improve my quality of life. I was going to learn glass blowing - still on the back burner (pun intended). We have a place called the Third Degree glass factory that has classes and offers time in the kiln and studio.
I also wanted to become a stone sculptor. The plan was to go to Italy and study there. I was about to make arrangements when the Missouri Botanical Garden brought a couple of master sculptors from Zimbabwe to St. Louis to give classes all summer. They allowed no power tools. All work had to be with hand tools and that is exactly what I wanted. Bonus!! No travel or housing expenses. I was in their first class and proud of my work.
I'm planning on building a small studio here. To me, stone sculpture is the bees knees of art.

CC! I need to know how to cut numbers into stone! I want my house number in a big ol' honkin' rock by my drive. Can you instruct?

 

[bamadude]

I think they carved mt rushmore with drills and dynamite. I got the drill if u can get the dynamite

 

[chickisoup]

I think they carved mt rushmore with drills and dynamite. I got the drill if u can get the dynamite

NO BAMA!!! She wants to carve numbers INTO the boulder
not make numbers out of the pieces of the boulder!!!

 

[ChickenCanoe]

that thread is a hot mess. We are several newbies at incubation, with a newly designed bator. People are having issues with temp spikes. The 9300 has a weired temp/humidity sensor that moves around alot. I plan to install a computer fan next hatch and see if it helps. It would be great if a hatching guru would stop by and help us out. But anyways; congrats on getting a bator and good luck with the ducks.

If using computer fans, which I did, I highly recommend more powerful fans in both wattage and CFM. I used the cheapest fans and they only lasted 3 settings before they were overwhelmed by dust.

Polish lay white eggs and silkies lay eggs that are sort of cream-colored. Chickens have a sort of "ear" flap on the side of their faces; that is often a good indicator of the egg color. Birds with white ones usually lay white eggs, those with red usually lay brown eggs. On Silkies, they are electric blue; not sure what that means but what else would you expect from a chicken with fur?

To the best of my knowledge, Penedesenca and Empordanesa are the only breeds with a white earlobe that lay a brown egg (and what a pretty egg it is). Not all birds of those breeds have white lobes, they're actually a red lobe with a white coating.

CC! I need to know how to cut numbers into stone! I want my house number in a big ol' honkin' rock by my drive. Can you instruct?

Stone chisels and wooden mallets. Find your nice piece of stone, I don't know if there are any limestone quarries in Alabama but I recommend limestone freshly quarried. Freshly quarried limestone is soft but dries hard. Draw the numbers on the face and start chiseling there. It's not that hard, just takes time to do a good job.
We have some monument companies that do it in marble and granite across from the two main neighboring cemetaries and now probably use power tools but when I was a kid, they did it with hand tools.
I like to be able to do things that few others can do. That's why I chose stone as my medium. Even at the huge art supply companies around here, there are no stone carving tools. Here's a couple sources. I don't plan on ever using power tools, but that's just me. I once saw a piece of limestone that was hand carved into an incredibly intricate network of vines. It was unbelievable and I was smitten.
http://www.thesculpturestudio.com/stone_carving_tools.html
http://www.jrpstonecarver.com/faq/suppliers.html
Many stone sculptors today use soft stone like soapstone or alabaster. My teachers chose much harder stone. The head guy, like I, want to really give the stone a hard whack and it doesn't shatter. The harder the stone the harder you can work it without it coming apart. But for your purposes I recommend limestone because it isn't that hard but hardens with time.

My whole family are very good artists. My oldest sister has her own studio. She and my youngest sister display together at area starving artist shows. They're all painters and sketch artists though, being weird, I chose stone.

I think they carved mt rushmore with drills and dynamite. I got the drill if u can get the dynamite

Yeah, much faster but doesn't require finesse. It's akin to doing an ice sculpture with a chainsaw. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's still art.