All posts by Craig

Some days you just want to…

Strangle your wife for reminding you that you have no memory at all.

Karry asked me to stop at the grocery store and pick up her tea for her as she ran out today.  I stopped, picked up everything  EXCEPT the tea… #whyme

The Tire Pasture Feeder Project

2016-02-06 11.39.45So Karry and I have been looking for a way to keep the horses from trampling all over the hay we put out for them to eat in the pastures.  The problem is that when the horses pull the hay off from the bales, a good portion of it winds up under their feet and then the horses proceed to trample all over it, pee on it and then refuse to eat it.

Now, there are all sorts of VERY EXPENSIVE solutions on the market for this, but we figured we’re educated people… right?  lets see if we can make our own feeder solution.

Karry called around to a few Tire shops and Hoosic Tire up in Cambridge had a few old Loader tires they said we could have.  So Saturday, we drove on up and snagged one to give it a try.

We figured we would try to cut out the side walls, lay it on its side and drop a bale in it.  What we didn’t take into account was the height of the tire once laid down and the diameter of the bales!

As you can see from the image here, the loader tire is about 5 feet in diameter.  It took nearly an hour with a sawsall to cut through the 1.5-2 inch thick sidewall, leaving us with 300 pound rubber shell that neither of us could maneuver without the assistance of our tractor.

The problem we ran into is that the round bales are about 5.5 feet in diameter, and once we finally got the hay up onto the tire, it looked like a scoop of ice cream sitting on a cone.  We’re going to leave it there and see what happens over time, but the solution may be to see if we can find some tires that are much larger in size!

The search continues…