Phase two of the tire footing...

After leveling the ground some we started the process of building forms for the concrete that will sit on top of the buried tires. To make the stakes for the forms, my brother-in-law Cale, came up with the idea of using leftover pieces of conduit that were cut by electricians on one of the jobsites Chris was working on. The leftover 2 feet of conduit are usually thrown away. There were enough to make most of the concrete stakes. We ended up having to buy a couple of sticks of conduit from the hardware store and that cost around $30. The pieces were cut into 2 foot pieces, two holes were drilled into the conduit to be able to attach them with screws to the boards that make up the forms, and the bottom was cut at an angle to be able to hammer it into the ground easier.

In this picture you can see that the size of the concrete beam that we will pour is not exactly equal in size to the tires.

Bending the forms around the curves of the grain bin was not easy. We had to use two 1/2 in boards because there was no way to bend an 1 board around that curve. The wood came from a pile at an auction ( we paid $5 for the whole pile because some of the boards were broken or molding) it was not the best quality wood but worked just fine for what we needed. It was only going to hold concrete and then be torn off and burned.

On the straight portions we were able to use 2x8 's, that we did save to re-use on other projects later.

We were able to get two piles of these sticks of rebar (already cut to the right length even) at an auction for $25 a  stack.

We had to drive sticks of rebar into the tires before pouring the concrete. The recommendation was to put one every two feet, we put them every  foot. When able to, we drove them into the tread of the tire. We found out quickly that it is tough to do. We had to weld a piece of rebar to make a T and then sharpen the end to pierce the tread by pounding it in with a sledge hammer. We then pulled that piece out and hammered in the straight piece of rebar that stayed in. If we put the rebar T in too far into the tire, we could not pull it back out and we had to manufacture a couple more of them because of this.

There is concrete!!!

10 yards of concrete delivered by two trucks. One of the trucks got stuck and they had to call a second truck to come and pull the first one out. It cost about $1000 for all the concrete footing.