Building a corral, part 2

A few days ago I wrote that I was starting to build a corral to allow me to manage the animals in my herd more efficiently.   Today I was doing sanity tests to make sure that it would work with the various types of animals that I have.   There are differences in pen designs for different species of animals. 

Click on the image for a bigger version. 
Holding area 1 is 16' wide by 60' long.  holding area 2 is roughly 20x30, holding area 3 is 30x25.  the crowding gate feeds into a chute which has a side passage for a scale or squeeze chute.  Most of the time you'll just use the straight shot into the loading dock, but other times you'll direct them into the scale/squeeze area for work or to weigh them. 

I want to be able to use this facility for animals I've just recently purchased at auction, for the management of my herd, and to load animals for market.  The scale is so that I can show customers the animals weight, and verify what the conversion ratio is between live weight at the farm and hanging weight at the cutting facility.
There's a gate (not shown) between the chute and holding area 2, so that I can run animals through the chute and either load them or put them back into holding, allowing me to sort through my herd by weight, for instance.

 This is the view into the chute area.  the crowding gate is on the left.  Where the panels are will be solid walls, and that piece of plywood will be the gate that directs animals into the scale area, behind the white board on the right. 

I put this up so that I could run sows and cows through the setup.  I wanted to make sure that they wouldn't balk and would flow nicely through the setup before I went further.  Much easier to rework at this stage than later. 

This is the crowding gate at full-crowd -- covering the end of the chute to the scale area.  the view to the left of the white board is the scale area.  I ran a pig and a cow through this a few times to make sure that they'd go in without trouble.  It worked. 

There's enough space to allow a good sightline, so that the animals going through can see the Temple Grandin recommended 3 body lengths  The picture above is from the scale area back into the crowding gate area. 

Sanity tests complete, animals move in and out of the skeleton corral correctly.   Next step is to construct the radius turn into the loading dock and then corral railings.