So is the art of taking down old stave silos with some sledge hammers, a couple wrenches, a bunch of steel cable and a dozer or excavator a lost art or what? You look on the internet and all you see are long reach demolition excavators and explosives. Just wondering what you guys think.
Silo Demolition As silos get older, and the concrete gets more deteriorated, the structure gets more unstable. An unstable structure can be very difficult to predict how it will react during demolition. We have demolished the silos with the method you describe in the past, but have stopped the practice. We demolish about a dozen silos a year, either steel or concrete, and have gotten very good at it. More often than not, the buildings are built very close to the silo, which makes the demolition more of a challange.
What practice do you use?
Be very careful around silo's when doing a demo.... they can kill you!!
many times Amish farmers will take down concrete stave silos, move them and re-erect them around here. Otherwise we have done the sledge hammer, wrenches, cable and dozer thing if it does not endanger surrounding buildings. Or, hire the explosives guy to shoot it down if we don't like the looks of things. In the case of poured concrete silos we always shoot them down. Very quick, not real expensive and no chance of it coming down on somebody running a machine taking it down.
You got that right gramps! of course I almost found out the hard way.......... back in my younger and dumber days I knocked over a few silos with the hammer and sledge and was getting pretty good at it too! till the last one twisted as it came down and fell at 90 degrees to where it was supposed to. Happened that as I was in my run to get away from it I looked over my shoulder and thud! three feet behind me fell the last stave! What I didn't know then but do very deffinatly remember now was the fact that the bottom staves many times have hidden cracks that will cause blowouts or twisting as the silo topples. Another thing to remember is that even if you have a cable on the top, unless you have a cable that is substantial the weight of the silo falling crooked will snap that cable and still kill the person below it...... I could go on and on about this subject, but I will say there are only about two ways of taking a silo down relatively safely. one is to fill the silo for the last time and keep taking the top rings of staves off as the unloader works it's way down......... this way is very time consuming sure but a lot safer. The second is the long boom ex..... and........... a Professional operator . don't half way your safety sirs.........unless you want to be seeing the man down below in a hell of a hurry.
I hope I'm gonna see the man above, Monte....being stupid ain't a sin.
I hear what your saying Mitch, and your right being stupid ain't a sin........... I was just referring to the way a silo could pound a person right into their afterlife..... If being stupid was a sin well heck the devil himself is got a special place for me then.........LOL
Well if the devil is so mad at you Monte that he makes you live in Minnesota,, what do you suppose Tiny must have done to be sentenced to Kansas City? bwah ha ha
: He tried to fix his brake lines.........what else?
Thats the only way we have ever taken down silos. I don't know anybody around the area that has ever hauled in a long reach or hired a blasting crew
We've taken down quit a few but always cable the top and have something hooked to them just in case, still it takes a lot of time and money to get them down, so if anyone wants to run around and use just a sledge hammer to knock them down, good luck, I'll watch from a safe distance and see how it all works out. There are some we won't take down though, they are way too dangerous for me to work on. I'm also curious Montee, with the taking them down as you go as they are unloaded how does that work if you don't have a tripod to hold the unloader in place, all the silo's I've ever seen either had ring drive unloaders or surface ground wheel drive unloaders and you still needed the cable to hold them off the silage as you unloaded them, only a jamesway unloader that sat on the silage and had the bullet pulled up the center would work like you described, all others need the cable to support the unloader? Upright silos of any make are sure a thing of the past, at one time we had 6 we used every day, and now they are either gone or abandoned for good, bunkers have taken the market over completely and for plenty of good reasons. I too have seen the excavator demo's on the net, looks way too dangerous to me, I'd think blowing them with explosives would be a safer way to do it to me. Last year a guy near me almost got killed trying to knock over a cement stave silo with an excavator, it landed on his cab and crushed the cab, he got out but was in critical condition the last I heard, by the looks of the machine, its a miracle he even survived.
Randy: If a farmer wants to take a silo down by unloading as they go they simply have to reset the tripod once a week or so. Tripods are not all that hard to move once the roof is removed. I've seen a few taken down where the farmer simply filled them up for the last time, and once the silo was filled and the silage settled they went in the silo with tools and removed the roof, Once the roof was removed when the time came to lower the tripod one simply has to slack the cable, letting the weight of the unloader rest on the silage, go over to the wall and knock one layer of staves free, once the one layer is free the tripod leg will settle down the next 30" or so. total weight of most tripods is usually not much more than a few hundred lbs. However if settling the leg is not an option then temporary setup such as highlift jack and a chain may be needed to set each leg down slowly. Please keep in mind that the silage level on each descent should not be any lower than four or five feet from the top most rim. this will enable the person performing the descent a comfortable working height and a "reasonable" safety ledge so that they will not fall. In that respect as well I recommend a safety rope while working near that edge as well. My main point here is that tripods are only bulky to work with but they are relatively light and can be "persuaded" to settle the distance of one ring of staves at a time. In fairness to your method Randy I would like to say that this is a very time consuming method but sometimes it is the only method that can be used when working near other buildings where the risk of falling onto other structures is great. Also, every time I have seen this method used it has been the farmer doing it himself as he/she feeds the silage out over the course of another winter etc. What I am most afraid of is what happened to me one time when that silo I was taking down twisted and almost killed me in the process using the sledge hammer routine. (I was a lot younger and dumber then). One guy I know removed the unloader entirely and shoveled the feed by hand until the silo was down and empty. Of course this worked only because he was only milking 30 cows and did not need all that much feed very day so he opted to do it that way.
Man the redefines patience to a whole new level there, we've taken the tripods out of a lot of silo's over the years and all you do is flip one leg up and in and let it fall to the bottom, but to mess around with doing it one layer at a time and then rewinch it every time and line the cable up again, holy cow that's a lot of fooling around, but as you described its totally doable. Around here when they are in confined spaces they hire someone to take them down just opposite as how they went up, dump out a dump truck of sand by the silo and then set up the scaffolding inside and start removing the bands and dropping the staves into the sand pile, if the staves are saved someone is down below removing them one at a time, it takes less than a day to tear one down by using this method, but those guys are getting fewer and further between.
I usually call Neisen silo nowadays, I guess one brush with a lump on the head is enough for me. If anyone wants their number just PM me I'll pass the number along.
That doesn't sound like it was a pleasant experience monte.
In that particular case the last stave landed three feet behind me.......... like I said back when I was young and dumb. I could tell ya a few other horror stories as well about pto shafts and getting dragged up an elevator too ...... but I'll save that for another thread some time.
This guy could do it! http://youtu.be/945T56ZxFkE If you have some time check out other vids with him, fascinating!
I don't know what you guys think, but I thought this looked pretty dumb. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nksEVPQ6cvs I mean, he's using an old slow 225 to poke and prod the silo. It seems like that is asking for trouble.
Look closely at the way the silo was falling, it wasn't real apparent, but that silo started to fall slightly towards the operator and the Ex. If that silo had twisted and crumbled just a bit more it would have been right on top of him.
The part I didn't like is according to his logo on the excavator, he does demolition.
Looks like an excellent way to get killed to me, and the even scarier part is between the one doing it and the one taping it they both were proud enough to put it on youtube! I'm no expert by any means but I"m also thinking the silo isn't 100 years old either, first off back then they didn't look like that and also were not that tall or big around either in 1911, so I"m pretty sure they got that wrong as well. It looks in the 1950-1970's era to me by the shape of the chute and bands and staves.
He didn't even take off enough bands in the first place. That's why it dropped down and just sat there, which isn't a good situation in my opinion. I was always told to take off bands as high up as you can possibly reach, and that's the way that I have always done it.
Have watched many silo demo vids on the tube and I'm really not a fan of using an excavator to take one down...point being aint a excavator around that can move fast enough if it is comming down. There is a risk involved in every demo but for over 50 years our family did it one way, and that was taking lots of time looking everything over and very carefully choosing your approach. Using a dozer was what we did...and it worked for us. Taking enough rings off first, and making your notch large enough to start with is key...its like notching a tree...once it starts to go you really can't safely go back in and take some more. Was at one once where another guy was doing the demo of the silo and doing the sledge hammer routine and didn't take enough rings off, didnt go wide enough on his center of his wedge and when it did go it sat into itself at about a 75 degree angle. when he ran up to bust more staves out it turned in mid crash and went right towards him as the back side had fallen out. He made it to the fence and the roof landed about 5 feet from him.
We always cable them at the top first before doing anything and then hook that to a dozer making sure we have about 50% longer cable than the silo is tall, we hook it to several bands in case one or two snap, we don't use the top most ones either, about 5-10 feet from the top so it doesn't pull the top few rows of staves off, then you have something hooked to the silo to help give it directional fall and also in case it decides to just do a dance and sit back down on its staves again and do nothing, you can still give it a gentle tug and over it comes. A lot safer than guessing what it'll do and where it'll go, never yet had one go somewhere I didn't want it to or hang up and just sit at some weird angle. We also use a dozer and chains to pull the wedge out, that way once your set up, nobody is even close to the silo, also making sure you have enough chains to be far enough away to start with, as for taking bands off to allow for a larger wedge, that depends on the silo and what condition its in and what kind of staves its made out of and use your best judgement as to whether you do that or not, sometimes we do other times not. I've sometimes used several cables to pull them over, hooking them to several different set of bands towards the top and have someone standing outside to direct traffic as to who pulls and how fast to pull but most times you only have to have the cable dozer drive maybe five or ten feet and the silo is down laying on the ground. By far the safest way to do anything I've ever found, that way nobody is even close to it if something goes wrong and you have some control over where it goes and how and also if it starts to dance as it comes down you can speed up the dozer to get it to stop and just fall where its supposed to go, no different than pulling a tree over with a cable as your cutting it after making the notch first, with the leverage you have hooked up high it takes very little effort to get it to go where you want it to, and out of the thousands of tree's we've cut down we've never had one we cabled go the wrong way and nobody ever has gotten hurt either, it takes good communication and have those doing the operating do what and when they are told to do it and have one person directing traffic and giving orders and if something ever would go wrong at least nobody will get hurt, things can be repaired or replaced if something weird happens but if nobody gets hurt or killed consider it good day and move on and learn from the experience.