Scraping Irrigation Pivot Systems - Tumbleweed - Page 3

Sounds good. If you like beer as much as I do, the wire may not cover the cost.

Nice job M!!! I'm surprised at the amount and thickness of the wire involved. See those things fairly frequently, never really thought how much energy it takes to move that much steel and water combined around a field!

Glad your "crew" helped out

Patriot,

How thick did the pipe wall turn out to be? Is it going to be worth more than scrap to you?

I really like your methodical method of dealing with the job. No wasted moves!!

Jon.

Originally Posted by sawmilleng

Dang! I wish I lived a little closer....first Patriot gets a hold of miles of boiler tubing of around 3" and now a shztload of 8" pipe....Would make the mother of all horse fencing!!

Jon.

Saw, I have an update for you. As you know my business is actually farm/ranch restoration. The motto for my business is "Preparing Farms for Future Generations."

I took your advice and sold the pipe and sucker rod to a horse trainer that wanted to build a round pen. He wanted a bid to build it including materials. I sold the material to him for .20 cents a pound (our local scrap yard charges .30 a pound and is only paying me .04 cents) and he accepted my bid per hour to build it. Most do not like bids per hour, but he knew my work ethic and did not hesitate when it was presented. Therefore a community service project (experiment) turned into additional work and more than scrap value.

The owner of the irrigation company could not believe one third of the irrigation pivot system was all ready completed and that the renter of the land had been contacted about his planting schedule. The renter of the land even offered to bring over a water truck since I went to the trouble to find out who it was. The irrigation company could not provide the information, so I visited with neighbors to find him.

Thanks for the idea.

Yunkman, your video was fantastic and very educational. The education part was how not to cut that sucker rod. If you imagine standing behind the closet bracing in the video and cutting the sucker rod on the other side of the bracing, you will see why you do not need to flinch when you cut it. It was hard to believe someone would cut from the direction of ricochet. The other advantage is having a three foot torch instead of a two foot torch. Thanks for posting that because it allowed for planning without practicing.

I never realized those irrigation systems were that big. It's hard to tell when you're looking at them from 38,000 feet.

Patriot,

I always thought that the two skinny tension members under the irrigation pipe were cable....I was surprised when you said they were steel rods... but all that much better for sale to horsey types!! Got any photos of the round pen you are building? Is it a portable pen or will you build it in place?

My present job is supervising taking apart some planermill machinery --trimmer/sorter/stackers and getting it into sea cans for shipment to Chile. Theres a shztload of scrap steel generated but its already spoken for. But I can get quite a bit of 1-1/2" square tubing--used for handrails in the plant--for gates and the like. I have my eye on some 5" pipe and will see if it is available-- for fence posts.

Jon.

Saw, the wall of the pipe is only 1/8 in. thick. The irrigation company probably over estimated the thickness to get someone to remove it for them. But as it turned out, the job presented other opportunities. This includes other pivot irrigation systems, material for corals, and the job to build the corals.

The round pen will be a permanent fixture and if done right will have solid walls to prevent the horse from seeing out. Now I wish I had the bottom of the water tank. It would have made a fantastic round pen. As far as pictures it will be awhile before this project is started. It is time to fish for walleyes.

Your sawmill transfer sounds like a fun project. Are you moving the head saw, twin saws, sharpening room, etc.? Any pictures? I would love to see this project, maybe a new thread to show how you chose your name.

Patriot now I see how you get so much done, it's that enthusiastic work crew everyone should have 1 or 2 of them.

For additional information about scraping pivotal irrigation towers I would like to direct your attention for a thread "Pivot Irrigation System" started by Yunkman back in December of 2013. It contains valuable information from etack, sawmilleng, pnutfarmer, and ironhunter. I wish I had found this thread earlier as it seems pnutfarmer is the expert in this area.

I apologize to all for committing the rookie mistake of asking a question that had been answered before on the forum.

Patriot,

In answer to your question about my sawmill takedown job:

I'll keep this brief--don't wanna derail your thread.

The job is to just pull some items out of a planermill. We aren't touching the sawmill, although some of the canter lines went down to the southeastern US...I believe one line went to Florida. Its a fairly modern planermill, and was running at 180 pieces/minute which is pretty respectable. The items we got are from the planer outfeeds, through an unscrambler, lug loader, trimmer, 32-bin lumber sorter, and out through 2 older lumber stackers.

Here's a shot of 4 of the 32 sorter bins coming out. it was a 29,000 lb pick--the crane was right on the ragged edge for this one.

Everything has to be cut down to fit shipping containers, so the dimensions have to be under 7'-6" each way by up to 39'-6" long. So that lumber sorter has to be cut down to pretty well the individual wide flange beams. We'll use air arcs to make a nicer job so they can be reassembled with minimal cleanup of the areas to be rewelded. When we are done the sorter will be at least 500 pieces.

I've already gone through a couple of boxes of paint markers, marking everything that comes out of there. I also had to find out where to get waterproof shipping tags to act as labels for small parts like photoeyes and hydraulic valves. The waterproof requirement is not because the stuff will be on a boat--but that we need to steam clean EVERYTHING before it gets loaded into containers. Modern international regulations are pretty stiff about not allowing any shzt into containers that could contain bugs or plants from your country. Here's your new word for the day: they're called "phytosanitary" regulations.

You wouldn't believe the miles of copper cable that is left over. And the scrap iron that will be left after we take what the client wants. It is treated so darned casually...like it has zero value--just a nuisance to clean up. The cable is mostly "control" cable and not very heavy--No. 14 and 16 stranded copper. But when you have an aluminum armored cable with 30 of these smaller copper conductors in it the weight can add up. Especially if you are willing to pull it out of the aluminum armor and strip the insulation.

If there's any interest in this job...its not really about scrap but skips around the edges of scrapping. I will post more photos and comments on a new thread if I get some feedback.

Jon.

I would love to see and hear more about your project.

Dakota,

The big picture here is that BC still is a huge player in lumber...the coastal D.Fir milling is still happening but it isn't as popular with builders as the "whitewoods", that is, the Spruce-Pine-alpine Fir, or "SPF" lumber. And the volumes cut are quite a bit smaller than the wood coming from the interior of BC.

The name of the game in BC is still "sustainable" forestry and the big guys still continue to suck up the small guys, to get their cutting rights. You might have heard that BC has gone through a heck of an infestation of bugs called the "pine bark beetle" that killed hundreds of thousands of acres of prime forest land. That has caused some upheaval because cutting rights evaporated as the trees became worthless. Not overnight, mind you, they can be still cut when they are dead but as the log ages the lumber sawn from it has more and more defect that if sawn from fresh green logs. So cutting rights are being rearranged, and there has been some upheaval as the less efficient mills get toasted. Forest replanting has ramped up as well.

I believe the mill I am working at was a casualty of two big companies swapping cutting rights to get all the rights surrounding their mills so they could operate more efficiently. So it wasn't totally a thing where this mill fell behind in new technology, as the stuff I'm taking out is FAST equipment.

With huge amounts of wood to cut at one mill, the ability to invest in state of the art sawing machinery becomes easier. A modern BC sawmill will hit $200 million easy. That sorter alone in my above post will shake out at 2 million if bought new, not counting the other machines and conveyors around it.

One of the latest things is robotic lumber packaging...as the units of lumber come out of the planermill, the last thing that needs to be done is to put lumber wrap "paper" (actually kind of woven plastic) over the load and put things like size, grade, etc info on the package. Some of the mills put out so much lumber that a package of lumber comes out every 45 seconds or so (on two lines) and has to be wrapped. It took 8 guys on 2 lines to do this over two shifts. The robotic packager does a nicer job, with just one guy tending two packagers on each shift. The packagers are a million bucks each. Its all about lowering your cost of production, since a sawmill laborer job starts at about $25/hr.

By "package" here I mean the lumber you see at your local building supply store--in 2x4 size, it usually is 13 pieces wide x 22 pieces high-- 286 2x4's per package.

Jon.

I like this thread & the detour it took. I would love to buy truck loads of lumber for my auctions.

Dakota,

I'm told that some of the companies in Chile use plantation wood for 100% of their raw material. Not a stick of natural forest is cut. Its supposedly 100% Radiata pine that grows to merchantable size in maybe 20 years...far from the 80-100 years that lodgepole pine in BC takes.

I understand the US Loblolly pine grows pretty much like the Radiata. With the addition I've heard that it just runs pitch when debarking and sawing. Probably smells nice in a mill but the shzts to work on any machines that are crusted in pitch!!

I wonder why no one seems to be looking at harvesting pine pitch for (renewable) energy purposes? It sure burns like mad! Kinda like tapping Maple trees?

Jon.