Today is a Good Day — my daughter’s rabbits are officially out of the house and that festering parenting fail can start to be forgotten. ‘Nuf said about that, onto the tractoring…
The new neighbors on the property adjacent to us remarked they couldn’t give away the aviary that the prior owners left, and my wife piped right up that it’d be a perfect structure to house the rabbits, and wouldn’t it be so easy now to just pop it over to our place and solve everyone’s problems? Hah! Two full weekends worth of work, I’m happy to report that it actually is quite a nice enclosure.
It’s about a 10.5’ diameter heptagon (7-sided) structure made from extruded aluminum framing that has 100’s of bolts & self tapping screws holding it together. It probably weighs no more than 125#. It took hours to remove all the intertwined vegetation and free it from the timber foundation it was on. The last thing I wanted was to then disassemble it for moving.
So, I made 11’ fork extensions by C-clamping a pair of rough-cut (full dimension) 2x4’s to the forks, and then screwing some cross-beams to that to support the structure from 8 points. Interestingly enough, my 160# hanging out at the very end of the 11’ extension is enough moment to just lighten the rear axle of the BX w/ rear-blade as counter weight (but no operator) such that one rear wheel lifts slightly. No problem: 1) the moment arm of the structure is centered at half the fork length, 2) it weighs less, 3) my operator mass will help counter. But, it was a fun test.
5 of us lifted it onto the forks and screwed the base down to absorb some of the wobbles and carefully drove several hundred yards of driveways and public road to get it moved. The lil' BX didn’t hardly even shrug at the job.
Hand dug 16” depth of anti-dig wire and built a cinder block foundation and set it into place. The kiddo helped out with the entire process and I couldn’t be more proud of her efforts — she’s really happy with the result she helped create.
