Last Friday, I went out on a field job to a chicken hatchery to make and install a small stainless steel chute. Normally I don't take pictures or make post about the jobs I do because none of them are particularly interesting. However, this one turned out to be so incredibly pointless that I found it downright hilarious (in a very macabre way).
The room I was working in was one of the sexing rooms. After the chicks hatch and are separated from the egg shells, the come in to the room on a conveyor through a hole in the wall. The conveyor dumps the chicks onto the circular conveyor of the sexing table. As the chicks travel around the table, workers pick them up, determine whether they are male or female, and toss them down the appropriate chute in the middle of the table. From the center of the table the male and female chicks are carried up sloped, divided, conveyor.
At the top of this conveyor, the two genders part ways. The females are dropped onto a conveyor that takes them over to some other piece of equipment that counts them and dropes them into crates for shipping. The males, however, are dropped down into a big rectangular funnel.
The problem here is the height of the drop from the end of the conveyor to the bottom of the funnel.
See, this hatchery has been getting a lot of complaints about this from a bunch of animal rights people because there are codes (pushed through by the animal rights hippies) that say that the chicks cannot be subjected to a vertical fall of more than 18 inches. The drop into this funnel is about 36 inches.
This is where I come in.
My assignment was to make a removable short stainless chute that runs from the end of the sloped conveyor down into the funnel so that the male chicks never dropped more than 18 inches straight down.
Since there was no real way to get enough measurements to fabricate something in the shop that would be easy to install, I was sent out to fit and fabricate on site. I formed a simple 7" wide 6" deep channel from 12ga. stainless on the press brake, grabbed a couple of pieces of 6"x12" 12 ga. stainless, some 1/2" SS round bar, loaded up on of the trucks and headed out.
After cutting away some existing stainless that was no longer necessary, I welded the 1/2 round bar across the top of the male side of the sloped conveyor. (Sorry, the bar is out of focus, I didn't want to waste too much time taking pictures).
After a bunch of trial and error and trips outside to the plasma cutter, I ended up with this:
As you can see the next picture, whole thing pretty much just hangs off the the 1/2" round bar. The notch just above that small, rather pretty colored, weld is where I folded a small tab outward to keep the chute from swinging down and hitting the conveyor belt.
Here is the other side of that tab. I ground a small notch out of the existing end of the conveyor for the tab to fit in, This keeps the weight of the chute from causing the hanging hooks to slip up and off the round bar. I also heated the tab up with the TIG torch and pounded it forward so that it also keeps the chute from shifting to the side.
No, I have no idea what all that multicolored crud is on that bearing, I was afraid to touch it.
Here's a bonus shot of the setup on the truck outside where I did all the plasma cutting, The red Ranger belongs to the shop and is there to supply the 220V power and the blue thing behind it is the shop's air compressor, and the other blue thing is my, personal, Longevity plasma/TIG machine:
I post this picture just to irritate all the import haters on the board. Inside, I did all the welding with my (personal) Dynasty 200DX, I could've used the shop's little Maxstar but I don't like the fingertip amperage control and it's usually pretty beat up and barely working, thanks to my co-workers not knowing how to use it right. I would've done the welding with the Longevity machine had I not needed it for the plasma cutting. Also, I could've brought one of the shop's little Thermaldyne plasma machines, but they get so beat to heck by my colleagues that I didn't trust it to work out in the field.
Now, don't forget, I said all this was pointless.
The reason this was pointless was because of what happens to the male chicks after they fall into that big funnel. Here is the underside of that funnel:
See where that tube goes? Here's a closer look:
They call it the masticator.
It sucks in the chicks, turns them into a fine pink paste and blows it up the tube on the other side where it ends up with, and is disposed
of with, the waste eggshells. Turns out there was a reason they didn't bother to have a chute like this installed in the first place.
That's right, this hatchery was forced, by the animal rights folks, to spend several hundred bucks (at least) to have me come out and put in a chute to keep the chicks from getting hurt despite the fact that six feet and less than a second later, they're all going to die instantly anyways.
I was chuckling the whole time from the sheer absurdity of it all.
The room I was working in was one of the sexing rooms. After the chicks hatch and are separated from the egg shells, the come in to the room on a conveyor through a hole in the wall. The conveyor dumps the chicks onto the circular conveyor of the sexing table. As the chicks travel around the table, workers pick them up, determine whether they are male or female, and toss them down the appropriate chute in the middle of the table. From the center of the table the male and female chicks are carried up sloped, divided, conveyor.
At the top of this conveyor, the two genders part ways. The females are dropped onto a conveyor that takes them over to some other piece of equipment that counts them and dropes them into crates for shipping. The males, however, are dropped down into a big rectangular funnel.
The problem here is the height of the drop from the end of the conveyor to the bottom of the funnel.
See, this hatchery has been getting a lot of complaints about this from a bunch of animal rights people because there are codes (pushed through by the animal rights hippies) that say that the chicks cannot be subjected to a vertical fall of more than 18 inches. The drop into this funnel is about 36 inches.
This is where I come in.
My assignment was to make a removable short stainless chute that runs from the end of the sloped conveyor down into the funnel so that the male chicks never dropped more than 18 inches straight down.
Since there was no real way to get enough measurements to fabricate something in the shop that would be easy to install, I was sent out to fit and fabricate on site. I formed a simple 7" wide 6" deep channel from 12ga. stainless on the press brake, grabbed a couple of pieces of 6"x12" 12 ga. stainless, some 1/2" SS round bar, loaded up on of the trucks and headed out.
After cutting away some existing stainless that was no longer necessary, I welded the 1/2 round bar across the top of the male side of the sloped conveyor. (Sorry, the bar is out of focus, I didn't want to waste too much time taking pictures).
After a bunch of trial and error and trips outside to the plasma cutter, I ended up with this:
As you can see the next picture, whole thing pretty much just hangs off the the 1/2" round bar. The notch just above that small, rather pretty colored, weld is where I folded a small tab outward to keep the chute from swinging down and hitting the conveyor belt.
Here is the other side of that tab. I ground a small notch out of the existing end of the conveyor for the tab to fit in, This keeps the weight of the chute from causing the hanging hooks to slip up and off the round bar. I also heated the tab up with the TIG torch and pounded it forward so that it also keeps the chute from shifting to the side.
No, I have no idea what all that multicolored crud is on that bearing, I was afraid to touch it.
Here's a bonus shot of the setup on the truck outside where I did all the plasma cutting, The red Ranger belongs to the shop and is there to supply the 220V power and the blue thing behind it is the shop's air compressor, and the other blue thing is my, personal, Longevity plasma/TIG machine:
I post this picture just to irritate all the import haters on the board. Inside, I did all the welding with my (personal) Dynasty 200DX, I could've used the shop's little Maxstar but I don't like the fingertip amperage control and it's usually pretty beat up and barely working, thanks to my co-workers not knowing how to use it right. I would've done the welding with the Longevity machine had I not needed it for the plasma cutting. Also, I could've brought one of the shop's little Thermaldyne plasma machines, but they get so beat to heck by my colleagues that I didn't trust it to work out in the field.
Now, don't forget, I said all this was pointless.
The reason this was pointless was because of what happens to the male chicks after they fall into that big funnel. Here is the underside of that funnel:
See where that tube goes? Here's a closer look:
They call it the masticator.
It sucks in the chicks, turns them into a fine pink paste and blows it up the tube on the other side where it ends up with, and is disposed
of with, the waste eggshells. Turns out there was a reason they didn't bother to have a chute like this installed in the first place.
That's right, this hatchery was forced, by the animal rights folks, to spend several hundred bucks (at least) to have me come out and put in a chute to keep the chicks from getting hurt despite the fact that six feet and less than a second later, they're all going to die instantly anyways.
I was chuckling the whole time from the sheer absurdity of it all.
