With the completion of the Version 2 of the watering apparatus in the Mustang Chicken Coupe, I feel amped up to get the Minivan Chicken Coop project underway. It isn't going to be that bad, its just really the installation of different hardware to make the coop a viable system. The first thing, while it was all fresh on my mind, was the setting up of the watering system. This of course will incorporate the bucket reservoir setup that is used on the other coops, a combination high pressure/low pressure system where high pressure water feeds into a regulator that feeds a float valve. The float valve fills the bucket which then gravity feeds the low pressure system that supplies the drinker cups. The first thing I have to do is build the platform for the bucket. The platform will incorporate a dryer door that will serve as a table, and a couple lengths of tubing that will serve as the legs. The other support side of the platform will be the fender hump. I had to weld the legs to one side of the dryer door then weld the other side to the body at the fender hump. The bottoms of the tubes were welded to the floor of the van, fully securing the platform in place. The next thing I did was attach a couple of angle braces to the sides of the legs. These angle braces will serve as anchor points for the drinker cup manifold. It will be zip tied to the angle braces at multiple points to hold everything steady. I did take time to assemble the manifold with the drinker cups, unfortunately coming up short by one drinker cup. One end of the manifold is capped off with a cap and the other side has a hose nipple. The bucket reservoir already had a hose nipple fitting screwed in place, due to the idea that this bucket was used in a watering system on one of the chicken tractors in the past. I salvaged all this hardware, knowing it would be used again, and here we are. I situated the bucket in place and attached the hose to the nipple on the manifold, after zip tying the whole works to the angle braces. The next thing I had to do was attach the float valve. This was as simple as drilling a hole to secure the float valve. Once that was done, I lined up the input hole on the float valve with the side of the van and drilled a hole through the side of the van. This hole allowed me to insert the 1/8" nipple through the outside of the van and into the thread on the float valve. Doing this effectively locked the bucket reservoir in place. On the outside I attached the adapter fittings and regulator, pretty much completing the MCC's watering system. All I have to do to make the watering system active is get a hose to the regulator and turn the water on. Of course it's not that simple, I'll be digging a shallow trench, like I did with the other car coops, to route a short run of hose over to the MCC, then routing the remaining hose up to the regulator. I might anchor some kind of pipe or tube in the ground with which to zip tie the hose to so its not pulling down on the regulator and 1/8" nipple. Other than that, the MCC's watering system is complete. The next order of business before I do that other outside stuff mentioned is to build a platform to hold the larger bulk chicken feeder in place.
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May 2023
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