Posts Tagged ‘scooping manure’
Manure Rake
Tractor Supply calls it a rake, but I tend to refer to it as a scoop, although fork could also work if you stretch your thinking. It is the tool I use every day to clean up after the horses under the overhang and within the two paddocks. It quickly earned its place as my favorite tool for the job. Unfortunately, it has a flaw in its design that results in a 100% failure rate over time, where the plastic breaks at three key stress points.
Once that happens, the tool’s days are numbered.
Before it even reaches this level of failure, I will have needed to bear down at least one time on the screw holding the handle to the fork basket to stop it from wobbling, but that’s an easy fix.
They aren’t cheap, but I am so attached to using this tool over all others I’ve tried that we keep buying replacements. Since I am not very good at throwing things away, I have a backlog of broken baskets and saved handles stashed around the property for other potential uses and occasional “aha moments” where I figure out a new idea for repairing them for use again.
A previous attempt to epoxy the plastic in the three places where it breaks gave out after the first use. That triggered an experiment I tried yesterday using a torch to melt the plastic. Wary of the possibility that the areas of the breaks might simply open wider from the heat, I took a trick from welding and used a single plastic tine from a different broken basket to melt into the cracks.
The plastic appeared to singe and burn as much as it melted, which wasn’t ideal, but there was enough melting that I think the idea has merit. This first attempt seemed solid, but when I used it, there was a noise that sounded like it might have cracked again, so the method may need to be improved. A wood-burning tool might be a better heat source than the open flame of a torch, but I’m not sure how I would keep the plastic from sticking to the tip.
I never learned how to weld metals, but I may end up teaching myself how to do the equivalent with melting plastic. It will be an art worth perfecting because these plastic scoops really are my favorite tool for the job, and I’ve got plenty of them lying around that are deserving of repair and to be put back into service for which they were designed. (They work pretty well for scooping up grass clippings that pile up when one has waited too long between mowings.)
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Messy Mire
The previous few days of rain and record-high temperatures have created a muddy mess in the paddocks. It really makes me miss the years when it didn’t rain in the winter.
I found skid marks in the big paddock that revealed one of the horses slid on all four hooves for a length of about four feet. I assume one of them had started to bolt and then tried to slam on the brakes. Thank goodness they all looked fine when we arrived to serve their evening feed.
The soupy surface was as hard for me to walk through as it was for that horse that had tried to stop. Luckily, the four of them calmed down significantly after a few minutes of munching feed. I was able to focus on the art of picking up manure around them that was virtually inseparable from mud sliding into the tined scoop.
I have a feeling the horses and I will share the feeling of relief when conditions change in some way that will to put an end to the sloppy mire. I am imagining the ground finally getting covered in clean, white snow.
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