Can you please show me pictures of how you store your shavings?
We have been using bagged shavings for the past 6+ years, but they are SO expensive compared to how much you can get with a full truck load. I would like to convince Mr. SSR to switch over, but in order to convince him I would need to show him a convenient, reasonably attractive, not outrageously expensive to build, way to store them.
Thank you!
Here’s a video of our famous (infamous?) Sawdust Cathedral.
If you don’t want to watch the unloading process, skip to the 3:45 and 5:30 min marks to see how the roof panels work. (I made this video for distant family members who couldn’t quite wrap their brains around what we were building.)
Cheap? Sort of … this is version # 4 of the cathedral. We have worked on it over the years to address various issues related to water linkage, rotting, etc. But we were able to buy the materials and do the work ourselves.
Reasonably attractive? Mostly. This version has roofing shingles on the sides that match the house / barn roofs, so it blends nicely. But it’s BIG. It holds 1,350 cubic feet of sawdust.
The biggest issue with storing bulk sawdust is that you can not easily push it to any great height … it wants to spread out. So you end up with a storage building that has a fairly large footprint. You also need to allow for access for the delivery truck, so a driveway and turning space for a big box body truck are needed.
We went with the ‘missile silo’ roof design because we didn’t want a 16+ foot height building on the property - the height the truck would need in order to back in and unload. A bit of a pain to handle, but we get a delivery once every 14-16 months (only bedding 2 very neat horses), so we round up a son and deal with it.
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For us, we decided having a dedicated building or space to store shavings was not the best option. SO took a small 4 x 6 trailer we used around the farm, and converted it to a shavings trailer. The lid flips over for loading, then locks back into place for travel. To unload, the back door or gate folds down in two portions, first the top for when the trailer is full, then as it empty’s you can fold the bottom portion down. It cost us about 40 bucks to fill the trailer about 5 miles from our house. Best part, if we have stripped the stalls and need to fill them, we can hook the trailer up to the four wheeler and just drive down the barn aisle filling as we go. I love it! Sorry, not the best pictures as they were taken with my phone.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/47214250@N02/8599569661/
I think there are a number of storage bins that you can probably make use of to hold the shavings if you just spruce them up a little. More importantly is get a bit of ventilation or humidity control for the unit so the shavings don’t get damp and spoil. Especially after you spend so much money on it, you’re going to want to take good care of the storage bin with all the shavings in it!
shoten star,
I couldn’t get the link to work.
[QUOTE=jawa;7809486]
shoten star,
I couldn’t get the link to work.[/QUOTE]
Try this one: Sawdust Cathedral
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You can see what we did with our sawdust bin, adding sides and roof last January. Funny how things get “improved” when husband has to deal with them!! Kids and I had to “deal with” the various ideas for covering sawdust for YEARS. Fight getting it uncovered when snow was multiple feet deep, ice, dug out by hand. I got a front end loader when I said I HAD to have a FEL or kill my shoulders with kids gone.
Then last winter, he was home more because it was too cold to work outside. He was having NO FUN trying to turn the tarps aside to uncover it. Then the cattle panels of roof bent upside down under the snow load, couldn’t get under at all.
So these photos show what happened. I put them in backwards order somehow.
Roof is high enough to drive the Kubota inside with bucket straight up, so he can push sawdust up and over the pile (partial) dumped from the delivery truck. Dumping small loads several times, lets husband put sawdust all the way to the back wall, piled VERY high to get the entire load inside. Our delivery driver is really helpful doing that for us. Roof height allows truck box under, to dump inside easily. Husband actually thinks we can get two full truckloads inside with piling it higher and using all the roof height for the load. Truck delivers 40 Cu Ft per load of very nice stuff. One load lasts us about 3 months with 6 horses, stalled daily. Two loads would get us all the way thru winter without a delivery, avoiding ice and snow issues in the barnyard.
Have to say having the roof has made life MUCH easier with getting sawdust out and into the barn with the FEL. We did put down a cement floor recently, between loads of sawdust. THAT helped a lot more! No digging into the dirt, making holes, getting the good gravel stones mixed into the sawdust! Have to say I was DONE with picking rocks out of the bedding!!
Husband does good work! The finished photo is kind of funny, because we didn’t notice how it appeared that the new sides, roof, “floated” above the grey walls that kind of disappear with fence boards, viewed from the road as you drive by. A friend pointed that out one day for laughs.
Our shavings truck doesn’t dump, it has a hydraulic piston in the bed and just pushes the shavings out the back, so we don’t need the roof to be terribly high.
I just have a three-sided building , I think it’s about 12 feet wide by 12 feet deep, with a roof with some overhang to keep rain from blowing in. It has a roll-down garage door on the front, but I only close it when a hurricane or tropical storm is coming. The shavings don’t get wet in regular rains.
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