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Eastern Iowa | I took ideas from NAT users and incorporated them into my design. Now we are making progress through the nuts and bolts of putting it up. SHould be done by the end of the week, and I hope to use it sometime the week after that. Lots of little fabrication jobs to do.
We sawed oak lumber for the sides of the alley. Most of it is cut 1.5 to 2 inches thick and up to 16 feet long.
A few hours one afternoon and we had plenty of lumber.
I fabricated boxed alley frames out of 3/16 steel plate to attach to the floor, an 8 ft galvanized guardrail h-beam post split in half for the sides, and 1 1/2" pipe header. We marked our arc for the corner and the straight runs for the alley sections and anchored them to the floor and above.
I attached some used bin sheets, bolted together, to the frames to make my corner section. We had to use a handy jack to get them to curve correctly on the inside corner. Once bolted, it was more rigid than I expected.
Went back to the shop and built a palpation cage for the front of the alley (my portable chute does not have one.) Once that was set, we could finish bolting plank to the frames for the alleys.
I saw slam latches that looked like these online, and realized how easy they would be to build. They literally took ten minutes to fabricate, from start to finish. The hard part was getting the hole through the pipe just right so that I could weld around it with a good fit.
Still working at it. Today we're replacing the wall to the maternity pen that we moved to make room for the alley, at ND Cattleman's suggestion. My curved tub is being built by a welder neighbor and should come beginning of the week. More pictures to come.
Edited by GangGreen 1/26/2013 13:43
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Update: In barn working facility
