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Reusing grain bins

Started by tsodak, April 01, 2008, 10:15:40 PM

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tsodak

This may seem like a silly question, especially for this forum but have any of you ever reused grain bin panels for anything else??? Around here you can find 3000 bushel grain bins for little or nothing. They are to small for modern grain handling equipment.

I was thinking about maybe taking them apart into the panels and maye making an arch out of a series of them and then pulling the bottom together a ways to make an animal shelter a little taller than wide. Or maybe rebending them a bit further to make a cylinder to use for a water storage tank in conjuction with a heating system. Or going the other way and opening them up a ways and making a pool. 

My question is a wonder if it is possible to bend these like I am talking without putting a fold in them???

Anyone have any experiance with this???

Tom

HOOF-ER

I have put up grain bins. My opinion is that you could not bend them. If you have ever messed with corrugations  they will kink. Some of the old bins are heavy too.
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Gary_C

There are still many of those old 3000 bushel bins around the country. I think they were CCC bins years ago when the USDA was in the grain reserve business. Most of those bins are in pretty tough shape now unless they have been repainted many times as the galvanizing has pretty much worn away.

Even though those small bins used thinner sheets, they are not easily bent or reformed. The corrugations make the sheets fairly resistant to rebending with out special steel rolling equipment. So most likely they would just fold or crease at the weakest point.

You could certainly use sections of them as animal shelters as they are bent, but you better fasten them down good as the wind will turn them into a dangerous flying hut.
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tsodak

A lot of these are from the 60's and many are in fair to good shape. The bottom ring may be rough, but the upper ones are still great. They are put together with bolts so they can be taken apart fairly readily.

I know the corrugations cause problems. The bins are like 16-18 feet in diameter, so an arch made from half would be 18 feet wide by nine feet tall. I dont really want it that big. iwould just like something maybe ten feet wide by 6 feet tall in the center. I am not doing the math, but maybe if each section were ten feet long, put to together in length and then fasten more on each side so you had an arch 5 feet tall and 15 feet wide. Then take a beam and attach it to each side, put a cable winch on each side and pull them together into an arch.

Coon

Alot of the bins are made with three sheets to make one ring.  I have put many, many bins together.  We used to assemble two per day with a three man crew.  Many of these bins were 5-6000 bushel bins.  We put alot of em on hoppers too.
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iffy

They make a nice form for a poured root cellar roof. They also work pretty good as a dugout roof where you dig back into a hill and lay up some walls, then cover them with a roof for animal shelters, machinery, etc. I suppose you could make a heck of a rocking chair too.

ksu_chainsaw

We have used lots of grain bins as animal sheds.  My brother works for a major Brock grain bin dealer, and gets lots of smaller, older bins that he has to remove to put up larger bins.  On most of the older bins, it is not feasable to re-roll the panels, although it can be done.  He has taken several 36' diameter bins, and put them back up on their side as sheds.  he takes 4" angle iron, bolts them to telephone poles, then attaches the rings to the angle iron.  On the first one he put up he did not stagger the sheets, and it had some problems in the wind.  On another shed that he built, he took several panels, cut them in half, and drilled new holes in the end, and they are holding up pretty good.

He also gets "cover sheets" from the new bins he puts up.  those sheets are 26 gauge sheets that have no holes punched in them to bolt together.  they come 2 per pallet of bin sheets, at least when he puts up the 72' diameter bins, and each ring takes 2-3 pallets, depending on how far up the bin they are- the bottom rings are thicker, so they have to break up the pallets to make weight.  Those cover sheets work very well for 10' wide sheds-  you use 2 sheets across, and the roof ends up looking like some of the older trailer houses- arched in the center, with about a 8-12" rise- the rain runs right off of it, and it is easy to attach the sheets- just use the siding screws with the rubber washers.

Also, the bin roofs are good for covering the end walls.  if you dis-assemble them all the panels, and turn every other one 180 degrees, you end up with a straight wall that you can use to block the end up with, or it can be used as siding on one side of the shed, if you put up a stem wall for more internal height.

I will try to get out to get some pictures of the sheds that my brother has built, but I don't know how soon that will be.

sorry for the long, rambling post, but I hope that you can follow what I said.

Charles

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