Barns made of cheap tin can withstand tornadoes
About five years ago, I decided to build a bigger horse barn.
I’ve always had barns made from oilfield pipe and built on 12-foot spans. Twelve-by-twelve stalls, 12-foot wide alley, multiples of 12-foot total barn lengths. Most of the time, the 12-foot increments works out good and the 3-foot wide sheet iron doesn’t have much waste.
My dad’s barn has a 16-foot wide alley way. I’ve always liked the wider alley, so I bought some graph paper and went to figuring out what I wanted to build. My new barn ended up 50 feet wide and 60 feet long. Fifteen-by-fifteen horse stalls on each side and a 20-foot alley up the middle. My sheet iron on the roof had to be at least 25 feet long.
There’s a local guy that builds big buildings and he’s always got some used sheet iron he will sell cheap. Before I started building, I called and asked what lengths he had. He didn’t have the lengths for the roof, but he had enough I could overlap shorter sheets and make it work. It took quite awhile for me to weld all of the red iron in place. So when I finally got around to going to get the sheet iron, he told me I was about to get a good deal. He said he was tired of mowing around all of this junk.
I had a triple-axle gooseneck trailer that day. He loaded so much sheet iron on the trailer I was worried the tires would bust right there in his parking lot. He originally quoted me a price just for the exact amount I needed. As he kept loading sheet iron, I began to get worried. He finally shut off the fork lift. I sheepishly asked what do I owe you. He furrowed up his eye brows, puckered his lips up, thought for a few seconds and said how’s $400 sound. Shoot, I couldn’t whip out the hundred dollar bills quick enough.
Once I got home, I discovered I had another problem. His big fork lift would carry much heavier loads than my tractor. All I could do was sit the bundles of sheet iron off the trailer and directly on the ground. I couldn’t move them, they were way to heavy.
I ended up building a 50-wide by 60-long horse barn and a 60wide by 60-long shop building. I still had a big pile of sheet iron in the way when I got done. So I sold it to a neighbor for $200. I built those two big barns for two hundred dollars worth of sheet iron after it was all said and done.
The only really bad thing is the horse barn has some pretty good leaks in it. The shop only leaks real bad on one side. Last year, some severe storms hit and I thought my junky barns would be the first to get blown down.
They didn’t get hurt at all, but a neighbor with a $60,000 professional built shop had his roof blown off. He was over looking at my barns and shop the other day. He is about to have someone build him another new one.
As he was looking mine over, he asked why did you put so many C perlins in the roof. I grinned at him and said so I won’t have to build it twice like you. He grinned back at me and said only you can build something out of junk and not have a tornado blow it down.
EDITOR’S NOTE: James Lockhart lives near the Kiamichi Mountains in southeast Oklahoma. He writes cowboy stories and fools with cows and horses.