For example, we now understand why grizzlies on the market are made from steel- our wooden frame really took a beating!īelow are some of our improvement ideas and suggestions for you if you want to make your own grizzly. While we’re overall happy with this project, it’s always good to think about improvements for next time. Future Improvements for Our Homemade Grizzly Best of all, the grizzly was made from materials we already had on hand, and it will be easy to take apart if we want to use them for a different project. This already had the large rocks removed with equipment.Īt the end of the project, we had a pile of perfect backfill ready to be used, all created by our own self-sufficiency. We don’t need a perfect pile of sand without any rocks at all, so this tool worked for us.
#MAKING THINKING ROCK PORTABLE PROFESSIONAL#
While our grizzly isn’t as great at filtering as professional designs, it’s ideal for our needs. Larger rocks rolled to the bottom while dirt sifted through the cracks and formed a nice, neat pile below.Īfter a few shovelfuls, it was clear we needed to double up on the support, so we added extra braces to make it stronger. We put our grizzly to work by propping it up and dropping shovelfuls of dirt and rocks onto it from an excavator ( here’s what it’s like renting and running construction equipment). Braces spaced six inches apart give the frame structure, and Jesse coated the entire thing with chicken wire to keep big rocks from falling through. It’s just a 2 by 6 floor plan propped up with posts at a 45-degree angle. The actual structure of our rock grizzly was simple. While there’s already a list of improvement ideas for next time, the fact that this rock grizzly worked at all feels like an awesome achievement. Making Our HUGE Rock Filterįor a first attempt at an innovative project, this was surprisingly successful.
Just some of the rocks that we removed from the soil. Our clean, rock-free soil for backfilling. Check out our expense reports to get an idea of what we do choose to spend our money on.įor this reason, Jesse tried his hand at making his own rock grizzly out of wood scraps and chicken wire, and it actually worked, especially after a few improvements. As you can probably imagine, finding a way to avoid this problem again quickly became a high priority.īuying rock-free backfill is always an option, but paying money for things we can do ourselves go against our mentality of debt-free independence. According to our installers, they’d never seen that happen before, so lucky us. A rock fell and hit it exactly right, causing a huge hole.
In fact, this already happened to our septic system when we were getting it installed. We can’t put these rocks back into the trenches because there’s a good chance they could damage the cistern tanks (some of them weigh over 400 pounds!). Mining grizzlies are built from steel and essentially work as a big colander to strain out soil from rocks and put them both into neat, usable piles.ĭigging trenches for burying our water cisterns left us with piles of rocks and dirt all over the place. In the mining world, the process of separating rocks from dirt and debris is fairly essential, so miners rely on a tool called a grizzly to do the hard work for them. Now that it’s spring, we’ve made some updates to our rock filter, and we’re using it even more! It’s really earning its keep as a permanent tool on our property. That said, before the soil froze, we had a chance to try our hand at building our own rocky grizzly and in three works… IT. We put an enormous amount of work into it and eventually had to admit defeat once the soil froze and became too hard for us to work it anymore.
#MAKING THINKING ROCK PORTABLE INSTALL#
If you’ve been following our adventures for a while, you know we worked way too hard this past fall in an attempt to install our water system before winter. He recently designed a new tool for us that works to easily and effectively remove rocks from our soil, resulting in valuable fill dirt on our property.
Now, that’s changed, and it’s all thanks to Jesse. For most of our homesteading projects, they’ve simply gotten in the way. Our off-grid homestead has a lot of perks… and a lot of rocks.
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