It is for all intents and purposes complete. There are a small handful of finishing touches that need to be completed, like covering wavy cut lines up with furring strips, and covering up a few small gaps where a mink might be able to squeeze in. The roost bars need to get installed, but I need a few things from the hardware store for that. It's taken almost 2 years to complete, we have been in the thick of having a house designed and built on the farm, and in 2022 and 2023, we got new batches of sheep, so the chicken enterprise has taken a back seat to the things that needed attention right then.
This chicken trailer will just be the roosting space for our flock of egg layers. It'll transit our farm, likely either with or adjacent to our flock of meat sheep. Our farm is in North Central Kentucky, and very hilly, so it'll basically always be on a hill. This made the flat roof an easy choice for us.
I picked the trailer up for <$500 at a farm equipment auction, with the express plan of turning it into a mobile chicken coop, thinking the homemade steel frame would be a great shortcut to building a wooden coop on top of a trailer (this was not the case) and I really SHOULD have just bought a beaten up old livestock trailer, cut the floor out of it and thrown some perches in, and used the tack box and feed area as nest boxes, but you live and learn.
When I got it back to the farm, I started by stripping the rotten wood out of it. Many of the screws fastening the wood to the frame were either welded on or just fused to the frame, so they had to be cut off with a cutoff wheel. It took probably 20 hours of time with a grinder and wire wheel taking the flaking off old paint and bubbled rust off. Then the frame got a couple coats of POR15 rust convertor, then needed a UV stable topcoat in all of the places that would be exposed.
This chicken trailer will just be the roosting space for our flock of egg layers. It'll transit our farm, likely either with or adjacent to our flock of meat sheep. Our farm is in North Central Kentucky, and very hilly, so it'll basically always be on a hill. This made the flat roof an easy choice for us.
I picked the trailer up for <$500 at a farm equipment auction, with the express plan of turning it into a mobile chicken coop, thinking the homemade steel frame would be a great shortcut to building a wooden coop on top of a trailer (this was not the case) and I really SHOULD have just bought a beaten up old livestock trailer, cut the floor out of it and thrown some perches in, and used the tack box and feed area as nest boxes, but you live and learn.
When I got it back to the farm, I started by stripping the rotten wood out of it. Many of the screws fastening the wood to the frame were either welded on or just fused to the frame, so they had to be cut off with a cutoff wheel. It took probably 20 hours of time with a grinder and wire wheel taking the flaking off old paint and bubbled rust off. Then the frame got a couple coats of POR15 rust convertor, then needed a UV stable topcoat in all of the places that would be exposed.
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