Okay, so, can you tell what this project is? If you can piece that together then good for
you. If you cannot, then I'm gonna reference you over to Rob's channel and tell you to
go look at a couple of his most recent videos. It's not too far back in his current offerings
where he revisited an automatic chicken feeder. So, head over there and you'll see what I'm
going to do with all of this. The how-to video will follow later when I can edit everything
together with close-up pictures and things like I like.
So, what you're looking at here is literally the least expensive large trash can that's
available at my hardware store. I would rather have had a flat sided garbage can but all
of those had wheels on them, and those wheels took up too much space and I would not have
been able to put as many ports in as I wanted, so I went with this one instead figuring if
I made a mistake, at least I didn't spend too much money on the garbage can and it's
worked perfectly fine since doing this project. The marks that I'm making are representing
the height of the pipe from the base to the center of the hole that's going to be going
through. When you use a hole saw, I need to recommend that you check the hole saw to the
pipe before purchasing the hole saw, because inner diameters, outer diameters and the size
of the hole saw may not match up how you expect, so make sure you compare that before you invest in a hole saw.
One tip that Rob had that worked great for me is running the hole saw in reverse. Doing
so sort of peels off the plastic rather than rip into the plastic and all of my holes came
out nice and smooth without any problems, so certainly an idea for you to use as well.
So here are all of the different ports going around. They're as equally spaced as I could
get them. There are 6 in total and when I say as equally spaced as I could get them,
I choose where these went by taking into account these raised ridges on the bottom of the garbage
can, so watch for any obstacles you might have on your can.
This is the pipe I'm using. You'll see one side is female, the other is male, for lack
of a better term, and you'll see why later. I took a piece of my cutouts and used it to
make a template. You don't have to do this, it's a little bit of OCD in my case of wanting all
the pipes to be exactly the same, but the point is you need to notch out a section of
this pipe and you need just a small section to actually support the pipe to keep it up
off the ground, and then you need a larger section for allowing the feed to come in under
the pipe. So, however you measure how big each one of those is going to be, just measure
off your section and make your cut. Here, mine basically works out to being about one-third
of the circumference is going to be for keeping the pipe up off the ground and two-thirds
of it is for letting grain into the area, so that's all I'm really trying to accomplish with
all of this extra effort that I would not go through if I needed to make another automatic feeder.
Now I'm going to start cutting these off and the easiest thing for me to use was a little
rotary tool. Here I've got a Dremel and I just basically melted through the PVC here
and cut off the area that I needed.
Now I'm also going to cut a window into this pipe cap and this is going to go onto that
male end of the pipe and try to keep even more feed from being able to be scratched
out by the chickens. Doing it this way, I've been able to avoid using glue, rivets or anything
else and my chickens have not been able to pull of this cover, so it's worked out great for me.
Here I'm just cutting out the window using the Dremel tool and then I'm gonna come back
around in just a second and clean it off. This is a tip that Rob posted in his video
when he still had some chickens pulling the feed out and putting this little lip on there
stopped them from being able to do that. It's working good for me.
Here's how the whole thing kind of fits together and that's why you want to have one pipe that's
got the male and female end on the elbow rather than one that's female and female.
Alright, now that just slides in from the inside out and on the outside I'm putting
the cap on and that just holds it in place.
Now Rob did a great thing where he connected those to a block of wood to make sure that
they don't twist and turn and come up and if this were a smaller bucket I can see why
that would be a real big benefit, but from what I've noticed on a big tub like this,
the weight of the grain keeps everything in place and so long as you keep it full you
shouldn't have a problem with those shifting. So, it's something else you can add on if
you feel that you need to, but I did not personally think it was needed for the size I'm using.
So, here's the birds using it just fine. They all get it, they can all reach it. You can
see it's elevated off the ground a little bit for their ease of use. It is under a shelter
so I'm not worried about rain and water, and otherwise I just want to thank you for watching
the video, and hope to see you next time. Take care.