Closing Hayloft Door

[Latestarter]

That's a nice barn you got here.

 

[Jeanne Sheridan]

That's a nice barn you got here.

We love it. The ground floor is divided in 3 with the east and west sides having concrete floors and smaller doors with access to the barn yard and pasture behind. We built dividers on those sides to bring our goats in at night in winter. We built feeders along the dividing wall but had to go back and add the vetical slats you see in the picture above them because without them the goats kept working our ways to climb over the feeds and the wall. The two main lofts are 10 feet up and run over the two side with concrete floor. Between those two on either end and 4' higher there are two more lofts, leaving about 15' square in the middle open all the way to the ceiling. There is a rail system up in the peak of the barn but it's so high we have no way to access it to see if it's recoverable.

 

[Bruce]

You just need a really long ladder! Clearly whoever built the barn had one

 

[greybeard]

I do have to wonder why people would make huge bottom hinged doors. That is a lot of weight to lift and the leverage needed when it is all the way down is substantial. I guess one reason is you don't have to worry about the wind blowing it shut.

How are the big side hinged doors opened and closed? Obviously you can't lean out the opening to reach the edge of the door to "latch" or pull it back closed.

I wandered the exact same thing but i figured they new better than me. In all honesty though I really can't think of a single reason why you would prefer the top down to the side open.

Lots of reasons for making the door hinge on the bottom.
1. It gets the door completely out of the way when loading or unloading.
2. As stated, you don't have to worry about the wind blowing it shut or finding a way to hold the 2 halves of side opening doors open.
but...the primary reasoning was pretty simple.
3. These barns were built to last 100 years, including the loft doors, and their attaching hardware...hinges and hinge fasteners.
When you install any door hinged on the sides, the stress on the hinge fasteners is completely different and much increased than on a bottom hinged door.
a. For a side opening door, (even if it is two 1/2 doors), the weight of (each door or) one big door for an opening this size would be significant. With the door standing wide open, the probability of the hinge fasteners pulling out of the beam that the door is attached to is very high. The door's weight is like a big crowbar pulling outward on the fasteners.
b. For a bottom opening door, the only stress the hinge and it's fasteners 'sees' is shear. The force needed to shear off a set of 1/4 nails or screws is a lot, even if the single big door weighs 200lbs or more. According to Simpson joist hanger chart, the shear strength of even a single 20d nail is close to 235lbs, so you can visualize just how much a set of fasteners holding a bottom opening door would be able to handle, decade after decade. The only time the hinge fasteners see any kind of stress other than shear might be the short time the door is being swung open or closed and that's just for a few seconds each time, as opposed to a side opening door being open perpendicular to the face of the barn for hours at a time while hay is being loaded and unloaded.

 

[mystang89]

That makes since. I've noticed many of the side doors on the barn starting to hand crooked. It's a pain trying to fix those.

Anyone have a barn pulley they feel like throwing my way lol

 

[greybeard]

Anyone have a barn pulley they feel like throwing my way lol

You can buy the whole thing relatively cheap...
http://www.timelesslumber.com/barnwood/trolleys.html

 

[mystang89]

Ok, so we were successful in closing the door but there were some links. One of the wood pulleys I have has small part of it's top side missing but it's enough to cause the rope to jump the side. I've thought about making the groove in the wood were the rope is supposed to run deeper but I'm not certain that will fix the problem.

There was another problem with the middle pulley from the pulley assembly not releasing when it got to the flanges on the end of the track. Still working on figuring that one out BUT progress. When I get it completely functional I'll take a video.

 

[Bruce]

Maybe there is some way to fill in the missing part of the wood pulley?
Is the one that isn't releasing doing that because of friction or is something maybe bent a bit so something isn't getting tripped?

 

[mystang89]

Finally got around to taking a video of the system I have going. Please excuse the blurry mess but it gets the point across. Also, the successful run that you see was run number 3...or 4, can't remember which. Run number two (or 3) ended with me pulling the rope clean out of the pulley assembly. I'm very grateful that happened and the rope didn't snap. When the door was being pulled shut, the middle pulley's rope was twisted as it entered the pulley assembly. This prevented it from being seated properly in the assembly which then means the springs that were holding fast to the flanges did not disengage as they should have. After fixing that problem, and probably more besides, we had the successful run that you see.

 

[Latestarter]

Loved the "cheer" at the end of the 2nd vid. Very nice! Glad you got it all worked out. Now if you can get the carriage to roll down the rail, you can use the system to lift hay to the loft for storage.