New High Pressure Water Cleaner has arrived …

I bought a high pressure water cleaner off e-bay. It’s a Memphis Aqua 3500PSI cleaner with a bunch of attachments. I need to clean out my chicken coop on a regular basis as my white leghorn chickens are suspected to have Marek’s disease (Turkey Herpes HTV). When the white leghorns die off, I will bring the Isa Browns into the coop. Before I do that, I have to eradicate the Marek’s disease pathogens from the coop.

I’ve read a few articles on the interweb about how to disinfect the coop for Marek’s and it appears that the process is going to involve some pretty nasty disinfectants. The Department of Primary Industry, Parks, Water and the Environment (DPIPWE) have the following article on disinfecting the chickens living area – Marek’s Disease, although they don’t mention a type of disinfectant to use. I have emailed the distributor of the HWPC to find out what chemicals I can use in the device … so I’ll see what I can do.

I’ve spoken with our vet (Montrose Veterinary Surgery) about disinfectants that are effective against the Marek’s disease pathogen, and her advice is to use Hospital grade bleach. My lovely wife and I decided that we’d like to find out, once and for all, if our chickens do indeed have Marek’s or if we have misdiagnosed the problem (I’m not a vet, so that is certainly possible). So we will need to take some of our chickens to the surgery for blood tests. I’m not keen on a post-mortem analysis, as that would be throwing the baby out with the bath-water.

If it is indeed Marek’s, then I will do a dry clean of the coop. That is, removing all of the chickens bedding manually, with pitchfork, spade and broom. Then I will use the HWPC with detergent to clean the coop out as thoroughly as possible, and then spray hospital grade bleach over the entire coop to kill the pathogens. All of this will be while the chickens are out free-ranging for the day. When the coop is clean and the bleach has dried, I will lay down new straw and wood shavings in the roost.

I will also need to have my other flock tested for Marek’s. If they both have it, then I’ll move all of the chickens in together, if not, I will keep them separated and repeat the disinfection clean-up on a regular basis (probably monthly).

Sickle repair

A while back, I bought a broken sickle from the tip shop. The blade was in good condition and not twisted. The reason that the sickle was at the tip shop was that the tang was broken and the handle was long gone.

When I got it home, I beat out a new tang for the blade and welded it on, then ground it down (roughly) … and then it stayed in my shed for a while.

On the weekend, I did some mowing with my ride-on Husqvarna. I just went around the paddock fence line so that I would have an easier time of putting up the new fence. I also cut around the chicken coop so that the chooks could scratch up some insects.

As the goats hadn’t been out, I decided that I’d cut the grass closer to the coop than the mower could get … and that I’d use the sickle.

I honed the blade to a nice sharp edge and then went to town on the long grass, cutting it and dropping the cuttings into the wheelbarrow. Of course, not having a handle on the sickle gave my hand a pretty hard time … and before long, my hand was bleeding from the rough parts of the tang gouging my finger.

Enough was enough! Last night I took the sickle back to the shed and cut a new 2 piece handle from some spare cedar and then I cut some 5/32 brass rod to make some rivets. I cut the cedar on the band saw and then I drilled three holes in the tang and matched the tang holes with holes in the handle blanks. I gave the handle a rough shaping with my bastard rasp and then set the rivets (that just means I hammered the rivets until they were flush and then used the centre punch to finish them off, rivets in handles don’t need to be mushroomed, just thickened a little). Then I rasped at the handle some more until I got the shape that I wanted, then it was onto the sandpaper.

The place that my finger was taking the most damage from was the 90^o angle between the blade and the tang, so the new handle is cut to ease this into a soft radius. I also shaped the handle so that it fit the curve of my hand better. Later on, I’ll rub some linseed oil into the wood … but that isn’t all that necessary.