Screaming blue drums with openings designed by space aliens!
Out at our place I find that we have to jury-rig things a lot. That is, figure out a way to make stuff work. (Or is it jerry-rig? Or rerry-jig? Depends who you ask, I guess.) Making do makes for a lot of ugly stuff, but maybe that’s the reason homesteaders build their hodge-podge empires way out in the country, so that nobody can look down their noses at you as they cruise by in their expensive Snooty Cars. As for us, we can’t afford most of the stuff we do, so we make do.
Case in point: These lovely electric blue 55-gallon drums. One of them used to hold jalapeno peppers; the other, olive oil. What are we doing with them? Why, whacking their tops off and filling them full of chicken feed, of course!
Chicken feed comes in mouse-friendly woven sacks that weigh as much as a Volkswagen and don’t keep anything out as well as they keep the seed in. That includes not only mice but moisture, mold, and anything else calculated to waste your chicken-feed money. You need something else to keep the feed in, even if it’s ugly.
Viola. (=Joke. It’s a literary friend’s corruption of the French. Voila.)
A local outfit uses these drums for food ingredients, then sells them to local yokels for $5 each. Hey, a bargain! But the openings are two inches wide on top, and I have absolutely no idea how to wrench them open. Never seen caps like these; they look like they were designed by space aliens. How to get the drums open? Hmm, how ‘bout power tools?
I sawed the top four inches or so off of both drums last Saturday and left them out in the vague hope that they’d get washed out by the rain. No dice. The vinagery smell has diminished, but rain doesn’t wash out congealed olive oil. My solution? Well, maybe I’ll dump the oil out on the slash pile in the hopes that will help the wet wood ignite. (I’ve been meaining to burn that slash pile for several weeks. I’ll report on my success in this endeavor next week, if I survive.) Then wash out with soap, if the poultry’s water line ever thaws out. Then reattach the lids with a cheap door hinge, and fill with chicken feed. Note to self: dry barrels out before filling with feed. Oh, and get the barrels into a dry location before filling. That would be splendid: trying to wrestle a screaming blue headless drum weighing 240 lbs. into the shoop. Yippee. I think I’ll try lighting a bonfire with congealed oil first.
good idea! I hope it works the way you planned!
Hiya Doug. I love the blog, even though sometimes I get behind.
If the same space aliens that designed my surplus barrels designed yours, try this to open them. The small openings are threaded. You can probably buy a specially-designed storage drum opening tool on-line, but pliers work great, too. Take a pair of pliers, close them, stick them nose-down into the center of the small, 3-inch lids, then open them until the jaws hit the outside of the lid, and turn counter-clockwise. The jaws of the open pliers will catch on the tabs in the lid and unscrew it. With the pliers almost fully opened up, you get lots of torque on the handles. You probably won’t understand what I’m talking about until you try it, but it works.
The three-inch opening probably isn’t sufficient for inserting and extracting chicken feed, so cutting the top off was a good idea. I hope hinge idea works. If not, you might try screwing blocks of 2×4 to the bottom of the lid you cut off. Place them so the blocks touch the insides of the barrel when the lid is on. With luck, friction will keep the lid in place.
Larry, the 2×4 idea is a good one. I don’t need to get the lid off anymore since I opened it the He-Man way: With POWER TOOLS! Bwa ha ha ha ha haaaaaa!