Friday, May 27, 2011

New farm equipment: The big stock trailer

Every fall and winter I worry quite a bit about flooding on my land; and with flooding everywhere being on the news this year, I've thought about it more this year.  So I've been looking for a big stock trailer that I could load all of my animals on in one shot -- a double decker.  Took a while to find this one.

Most of my animals are pretty short -- pigs and sheep -- and so what I've been looking for is a double-decker trailer, and after scouring the internet for around a year, I found a nice aluminum double-decker trailer for sale in Montana, and I drove over there earlier this week to look at it, and ended up buying it and towing it back. 

It's 32' long from tip to tailgate, and has a removable aluminum floor that you can store on the inside roof of the trailer.  The floor is 8" or so wide aluminum planks that fit into a slot that runs the length of the building.  The slam gates in the center are split, so you can open or close the top or bottom independently.  It weighs 6,000lbs empty, and has a payload of about 15,000lbs according to the manufacturer. 

It'll easily hold 60 full-sized pigs, which will be over limit for highway use, but for flood evac should be just fine. 

As with any equipment that you put on the road, the neater and cleaner it looks the less attention you'll get from the authorities, so the plan is to go over the trailer and sand and paint the rusty spots and then give it a good shine.  It's aluminum, and in good shape overall.  Happy with the purchase. 

2 comments:

Amazed said...

Can I ask how much you paid for this double decker?

Bruce King said...

I have terrible problems with buying equipment. I always think I overpaid, and I torment myself by searching for "better" deals. In this case, it's the largest trailer I could use without a CDL, aluminum so I don't have to worry as much about corrosion and better fuel economy for towing, more payload, less trailer, and had the 2nd floor decking in good shape, with an easy place to store it when I need to haul taller stock. So with all of that, I thought that $12,500 was fair.

You can get cheaper aluminum stock trailers, and I looked at 15 or 20 of them, but this one was beefy enough,and it seemed like $10-11k was the going rate for a large aluminum stock trailer.

It's a $4k option at the factory to get double decker.