Got notice that part of the cyclonic dust collection system shipped and is due here the 18th. It is the main unit. All the duct fittings and stuff will be delayed since they haven't mailed me their duct design for review yet. I'm thinking it will probably NOT be installed and running by the end of the month. OH WELL, I have some fencing and stuff to occupy my time. That and a dozen first time heifers about to pop. Me a midwife to a bunch of Angus heifers????
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
</font><blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr />
a midwife to a bunch of Angus heifers????
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Been there and done that, and don't especially care for it, although I don't think yours should be quite so bad. Most of my experience was during the hours of darkness, colder'n a well digger's hip pockets, with cows that were so wild they had to be tied to a tree or the truck bumper to keep them from attempting to kill us.
Who gets to do the nightly checks or do you take turns?
A closed circuit surveillance of the calving area would allow you to remain in bed. [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img] [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
Bird, My heifers are not petable but will come up to within a foot or two to sniff me to see if I have a bucket of feed in my pocket. A friend has 10 head running in with mine and one of his cows is a WILD THING. I keep one of his bulls at my place and he has mine at his till we see the calves my young bull produces.
His bull is a real tank, a huge black Angus but the only threat to me is if I should do something stupid like dump a bucket of feed in front of him and then stand there in the way because he might step on my foot. He is one calm laid back bull but takes care of business just fine and produces nice calves with low birthweight which is easy on the momma but the calves are fast gainers and get big fast.
I have read research reports that correlate the time you feed the expectant mothers with the time of day when they drop a calf. Feeding in late afternoon has a strong tendency to cause the calves to be born during daylight hours whereas feeding early or randomly and a lot more calves are born at late and unusual hours which is, as you know, not convenient for you or any vet you may need. So I feed only well after lunch and up to about sundown. The 11 first timers make me nervous as I'm not the best midwife around by a long shot.
I'm anxious to see if the cyclonic dust collection system will work as good for filling drums from bulk feed in my dump trailer as I hope it does. I know food processors use systems like a woodworking dust collector to move bulk materials. Hopefully it will work for me so my wife and I will not be doing it by hand next time. We use a 2 gal bucket to fill 5 gal buckets to fill drums. Not fun when you are moving several tons of feed.
If this "other duty as assigned" task for my dust collector works to my expectations, I will be able to fill drums easily, roll them out of the garage onto the apron and use the tractor to put them on the trailer and then use the tractor to unload the trailer at the barn where I store the drums.
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
Pat, I've seen a few (probably much cheaper) dust collection systems, but nothing like you've described, or nothing that would be used to move feed. [img]/forums/images/icons/confused.gif[/img]
Right now the heifers are free to roam in the NE 40 acres plus a half acre holding pen, corral, and a feeding area inside the barn where the feed troughs and mineral troughs are located. I hope to fence off a couple acres with temp electric fence that abuts the corral on the other side and confine those closest to popping there. It will require me to fill water tubs every other day if not every day (depends on temps a bit) but I have water to a frost free hydrant at the barn now so it is not a big deal.
By limiting them to a smaller conveniently located area I figure we won't be out crawling through the worst brush and gullies where they instinctively try to hide in order to check on them.
Trying to have remote surveillance for a 40 plus acre area with some of it treed and some brushy back sides of dams and such is not too easy. I guess I could launch a UAV with telemetry, an eye in the sky.
I can see the area I will be using to confine them when they are really close to popping from an upstairs window and can see if any of them are down (unless they hide behind the barn. Still as their time approaches the frequency of checking will go up to at least twice a day.
...and Bird, I respect your experience with wild cattle. Since I have a choice, I will not tolerate any individuals that are hard to handle. So far so good. Mine are almost like puppies.
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
Typical dust collector systems with bags as filters pull the dust and debris through the impeller on the way to the bags. A cyclonic unit runs the stream of air carrying chips and dust through the cyclone where most of the stuff falls out at the bottom into a drum. Then the air goes through the impeller and then through a filter effective down to a fraction of a micron.
Many of the bag type mentioned first above spew out a tremendous amount of the finest (too small to be seen till it builds up a film)dust which you get in your lungs PERMANENTLY as it is too fine for your cilia to remove.
Quite different in the way they work. If you see a cone shaped thing with a duct going into it tangentially at the top and an outlet at the bottom (tip of the cone) at a woodworking operation or a mill or whatever, it is a cyclone type. Since the pelletized cattle feed would not go through the impeller it won't get ground up.
Pat
"I'm not from your planet, monkey boy!"
A friend of mine has video surveillance of their calving area. They put the expectant cows into a small enclosure just for this purpose. [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
Egon [img]/forums/images/icons/grin.gif[/img]
[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Pat, what you really needed to build is a "baghouse". You may have seen these in industry, but in case you haven't, I'll sort of give you a general idea of what they are. First you get a chamber that is big enough to walk into and has a gasketed doorway suitable for vacuum. You pipe the debris-gathering pipe into this chamber. The walls of the chamber have circular holes about seven inches in diameter. Into these holes go a couple hundred cone-shaped vacuum cleaner bags with the cones pointing out of the chamber. So now it looks like a box with horns poking out. THEN you put THAT chamber inside a bigger chamber, also vacuum tight and with a gasketed door. You cut the outer chamber and slide the debris pipe completely through it and circumferentially weld it not only on the outer chamber but butt-weld it onto the inner chamber as well so there are no leaks and the debris will shoot right through to the inner chamber. THEN, you cut a huge suction pipe into the outer chamber that goes to a big centrifugal fan with very low NPSH capability; .... maybe something that runs at 870 RPM. The discharge side of that fan has some token flat filters just to keep the EPA happy, but the cone filters are actually holding all of the crud. Once a week you stroll into the inner chamber and swap out the bags. Pat, you could put together a reasonable sized model for well under twenty grand, not counting the gen set needed to run the 100 HP suction fan. [img]/forums/images/icons/crazy.gif[/img]
CJDave
[img]/forums/images/icons/tongue.gif[/img] Pat, you have doubtlessly sped by a strange-looking semi on the freeway and may even have noticed that it had a PTO-driven Roots-type blower sitting on the short deck between the cab and the first drive axle of the tractor. The body of the trailer may have had three or four distinct compartments that are all linked with a common tube at the very bottom of the cone-shaped compartments. The blower blasts air down the tube and as it blows by the small opening to a compartment, it picks up the kernels of grain and entrains them in the stream, all the way to the top of very tall silos, where a cyclonic separator awaits. You could get one of these for cattle feeding; a smaller version, of course. [img]/forums/images/icons/smile.gif[/img]
CJDave
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