Aluminum or Steel Livestock Trailer: Which is Better?

hey everybody it's ryan welcome back to hal farms work so we are headed over to the farm the new trailer just came in so we're gonna go take the truck up get the trailer so my cousin's husband my cousin-in-law anyway derek mcbee up in linecaster he's a guy that i know i know a guy well we took the big red hood up to derek for him to work on slash fix patch it back together and he just said that it's ready to go so while we're up getting the trailer we're going to see if we can't fit the hood on so let's head over to the farm and go pick up the trailer for those of you who don't remember what happened with the hood on big red was i pulled it into the shed to change the oil out on it change the filters and at the end of the day when i went to put the hood down it broke right off so um left with not a lot of options because a replacement hood can go anywhere from 1250 for an aftermarket one and i couldn't even find one that would fit this truck but uh that was unpainted without anything on it or a used cracked hood that is actually the same color red was 2400 so i'm not totally sure if we're gonna change hoods out ever with the truck i was looking at possibly upgrading to a different truck and selling big red but for right now i think that we're just going to put it back on and run it as is just to get us by through spring and then i can make longer term decisions in the long run rocket come here booty huh look like you had a rough night's sleep so there's our old featherlite steel trailer i'll put the ball over [Music] okay [Music] [Music] we got the trailer it's time to see how the hood turned out [Music] yeah looks pretty close to brand new good enough for me [Applause] actually yeah it might just go one good thing is the front sits on the [Music] hinge [Music] i would not want to be the person painting this trailer just got painted too could you imagine painting in here how much oh you won't be able to see that's why it looks that's why it has a little close to it you got getting all that out of there it would just be it would just be like this yeah when they bought it it does tip back at least that can's in there it's not going to let it come right down they said it was 20 years but i remember it was my senior year high school when they did it that was 2007. [Applause] all right i really want to get the hood back on so hmm that's pretty good that's to the front brace 25 before how wide is it i was gonna ask how wide that door is no guarantees yeah [Music] want to do that first you want to get them springs in to make sure that we're let's get the straps hooked so that it can't fall over straight straps yeah [Music] or so the part we're trying to get in right now we've already got the hinges on they're not tightened down we've got the straps on top but there's these metal plates that act as springs trying to get them lined up right see now mine's bowed i don't know if i went down too far with it right put this down on the straps i think you can let it down though just watch that vice grip hey ryan you think that'll be easier no yeah finally a realist someone's still probably gonna have to hold it though because there's pressure on those springs right at least now i mean i could hold it open if it's easier to get at them that way oh yeah oh look i'm off the grill yeah i had right i had those as i was i had those as like spacers okay we got the springs where they need to be now we're going to move these because the hood isn't sitting where it should be so we need to adjust this one so that we can have the hood setting right because the hinges have not been tightened down yet so now is the time to get the hood placed where we want it and then we can go ahead and tighten that down once it's where we need it dad got the hood all adjusted so now it closes like it should it doesn't twist it's the first time i've actually been able to stand at the front and open and close it i always have to stand up to the side and hold the one side up because it was always broken off so it's better than when i bought it the grille is still not in yet but we're gonna go ahead and start hooking the lights back up we're supposed to just have these plugs on them so they should just plug together but unfortunately the one on his side was soldered together [Music] [Music] so a lot of you have gotten annoyed by big red's grill because it was a couple of these grates are broken off well i'm fixing that issue now [Music] boy does that look nice [Music] now since i didn't get to the other day i want to take this for a quick spin [Music] [Music] so we got the truck all put together now dad and i just got back from taking it for a test run a couple people were asking why we didn't just uh weld the hinges up the thing is that the hinges themselves weren't the problem the hood itself was cracked out around the hinges so he basically took the stuff called panel bond i think it's called and uh goobered it up all over the inside he said that that stuff is 60 a tube and he used four of them to keep everything plastered together and if you look on the inside there's a lot of it in there so anyway that's pretty much it for the truck um not sure right now yet whether i'm gonna try to sell it or keep driving it but there is an underlying issue that needs to be fixed yet and that's that it does still leak coolant and that's kind of a big uh issue that i got going on with that so let's come on over and have a look trailer so this is an sns dura line made out of alma iowa and i'm sure a lot of you are wondering why we chose a new steel trailer over an aluminum one so i decided that i'd spend a little bit of this video talking about the differences between aluminum and a steel so this is our old featherlite steel trailer it's 20 footer this one is a 24 foot now the price on this one was right around 12.5 and a brand new aluminum 24 foot stock trailer would have costed us north of 20 000. so if you look at the lifespan of trailers between steel and aluminum we would probably still be expecting to see about a 20-year return out of a trailer at least if we went the aluminum route but how many people buy a trailer a brand new aluminum trailer and aren't looking at trading it off sometime soon after 20 years so we were looking at it going we can put less investment into our trailer and spend the money elsewhere and it's just a lower cost overall compared to going out and spending a ton of more twice as much money on aluminum when we're not really seeing much of a difference there yeah at the end of a 20-year period an aluminum trailer is going to have value left in it and a steel trailer is probably just going to depreciate away to nothing because it'll rust but by the time you look at the difference in the depreciation there we didn't really see much difference and uh a big reason why we went the steeler out also is because with a steel trailer we can work on it ourselves versus if we bought an aluminum i've hauled using a couple different aluminum trailers and each one of them had the same problem going on with the back door and that problem was that [Applause] this part of the door frame down here on all the ones that i have used have either been repaired or were broken off so by going steeler out we can fix it ourselves we don't got to worry about going to someone else and asking for them to patch it up another thing with steel is that right out of the starting gate it is stronger than aluminum uh will it be after you know 20 years it's a whole different story it's a whole different ball game because aluminum is probably going to maintain more strength over 20 years compared to the steel especially in the lower spots along the trailer where we have had rusting over there looking at the floor in this one this is a wood floor it has one intermediate door which honestly i'm not totally sure how open [Music] okay so the intermediate door is sliding along with the back door that's a feature that we haven't been using on that one recently but i know that it's going to be nice having these doors fully working again so overall i'm pretty satisfied with the choice of trailers i'm glad that we went for the 24 footer instead of the 20-footer i think it's gonna save us time in the long run [Music] [Music] anyway [Music] there you go [Music] ryan i need your help with what dad that's we've got the side door up there similar to our old steel trailer so overall it's still very similar to our old one now for the amount of hauling that we do we didn't really see a need to put 20 000 into an aluminum trailer when we're only hauling a couple times a year so that's another reason why we went to the steel route overall just lower investment and we can fix any problems that we might have ourselves at least on that one we did we've made multiple repairs to it we've put in paneling along the sides to give us more support and whatnot so anyway that's the reason why we chose steel over aluminum um but let me know what you guys think down in the comments section so anyway thanks for watching this video guys be sure to like comment and subscribe and be sure to follow us on facebook instagram twitter and snapchat all hell farms work and uh let me know what you think down in the comments section on whether we should have gone with an aluminum or steel or what your thoughts are on them uh any other comments like that i'll be giving away a high farms work hat to one lucky commenter so with that i'll see you next time guys

Channel: How Farms Work

Views: 79,817

Keywords: gmo, farm, farming, farmer, agriculture, ag, tractors, tractor, pulling, hay, corn, alfalfa, fieldwork, chores, straw, grain, harvestore, combine, cattle, dairy, beef, crops, crop, rural, silo, soybeans, soy, ryanfun1, How, Farms, Work, How Farms Work, Ryan Kuster, farm bureau, organic, animals, farm work, John Deere, tillage, millennial, harvesting, Wisconsin, Potosi, New Holland, RhinoAG, education, harvest, GMC, food, science, family, how farm works, midwest, JCB, this vs that, livestock

Id: QHeWtXJJphw

Length: 18min 42sec (1122 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 31 2021