How can I straighten a bowed 4x4 post?

so what we're looking at here is what is eventually going to be a chicken coop and we need the chicken coop because we need to reclaim our barn I need to be able to use the barn for well you know parking Barn stuff in and so on and it's annoying having all the chickens in there having to go out there and close the door every night Etc so anyway the second coop is going to be extremely useful now it's still in production and has been for quite a while just because well I'm working 12 hour days six days a week sometimes and you know I don't have an opportunity to come out here every day every night because I'm working two jobs basically but anyway Danielle has made some uh wonderful strides you can see it's we got sectioned off for you know the different breeds and anyway it's going to be a chicken coop we just have to get the rest of this done a couple panels on the wall and build the trusses and then we will be on our way to a chicken coop but it was a problem a big problem as a matter of fact so I have in my hand this trusty Ultra reliable you know the name you know what it says right there you can't get a level more accurate and I have this trusty reliable level that I have used that's a a quarter of a degree off can't get a bubble level that accurate yeah let's check this one over here almost the same so almost perfectly level but you come over to this one right here that is really off but it's not off because we didn't level it because each and every single one of these as I put them into the ground I leveled them that's not the reason why this one is not level hang on just a second let me move this ladder now I know it's hard to pick up on camera but this board is actually bowing to the left as it goes up as it goes up it's bowing to the left it is not leaning it is not as if it went in the ground you know crooked or whatever it is not leaning it's actually bowing to the left and you can kind of see where it starts doing it I know it's hard on camera starts doing it right about right here and then just progressively gets worse and starts bowing out or inward actually the higher you go and it's really off at the top I mean really off you could see just how bad it is up there so here's our dilemma what the heck do I do about it because this is actually where one of the doors is going to be hinged so there's going to be two entry doors one right here one right here this one will be just fine but this one is going to be way off I mean it's going to look absolutely ridiculous because it's just not going to be lined up it's nothing's going to be um Plum whatever you want to call it so I mean it's really bad I'm gonna see how bad it is up there turn this around now you see here 87 about 87 degrees three degrees off in the top which doesn't seem like much but it is a considerable amount and at the bottom let's see what we got for that we are oh looks like about a half a degree at the bottom so it is bowing as it goes up not good and we didn't notice it until oh maybe a week ago when we were looking at it and we said what the heck well I went around and checked all the others and they're fine it's just this one and again it's not because I put it in leaning it's just because the whole 4x4 started to Bow inward so my question is how do we fix this I saw some YouTube videos of people who had a deck and they made relief Cuts all over the place they put boards in between other boards to push it out well as you can see here because this is where the door is going we don't have any other boards along this row it's not like I can take you know a 4x4 here and push against this and slowly push it out that's not possible there's no way for me to do that because I have nothing to Anchor it to now a suggestion that my neighbor had was to run a sprinkler on it run a sprinkler on it set it up high run it on low so it can trickle down obviously get those boards off of there so they don't rot and use my tractor with a winch park it over here somewhere and pull on it a tenth of an inch every you know 8 10 12 hours pull on it from the top so that it will slowly work its way back I don't know if that's going to work but I'm really fresh out of ideas this is not something we can just work around I mean you can see the boards you know there's a big gap here in the board because it's coming away um again the the door is going to be mounted here so the door is going to be all wonky and crooked it's not going to close straight this isn't something we can work around and hope for the best this is something that needs to be fixed if it was any of these others I wouldn't be worried about it all we wouldn't be we could either brace it or we could get around it it's not going to be that big of a deal but this one here is a critical because it's actually got the door the door hanging from it so and I'm also concerned that it's going to get worse that if we try to use things like shims and and whatever to straighten it out that it's just going to get worse clearly there's a reason why this one 4x4 out of all of them is bowing inward I mean there must be the way that it was drying we don't know it was straight when we put it up there believe me I would have looked at it and said holy crap this is way off and uh it it just started bowling inward so that's uh it's kind of where we're at right now I'm looking for ways to fix this last thing I want to do is rip that out of the ground I mean I don't have anything here that's capable I mean even that tractor over there with its lift you know it'll probably break something by the time this comes out I mean it's it's in the ground quite a way so I'm concerned that I would break something I mean that would be a last resort anyways um if there's another option great if that's the only option that we have is to rip it out and start over fine and that's what I got to do but I was hoping there'd be a solution what do you think of that whole winch the tractor pulling it from the top run some water down it and try to straighten it out I mean the worst case scenario it I mean it breaks off I mean what else am I supposed to do here it's either going to break off or we got to yank it out I don't know so what do you think I just don't want to go to all the trouble of uh trying to find somebody that has a lift that can actually pull it out and then from there you know I'll have to get another 4x4 get some more concrete let it cure for you know three four five days before we can put a door on it I mean it is what it is I'm hoping for something a little more simple where I can just hook the tractor up and let it pull it out slowly with the winch um I don't know what do you think what are your what are our options here otherwise this thing is going pretty good we have to do the trusses here pretty soon um building our own trusses so we have to do those pretty soon but yeah there you have it got some extra boards too I don't know why we ordered some extras I guess there's nothing wrong with that um this will be treated from the outside and yeah I'm looking forward to getting this thing done we need to get them in here and enclosed and we've got this fence down here to prevent anything from digging in because we do have predator issues out here I'm not talking about coyotes I'm talking about raccoons and that is one example that would be one of our chickens that got caught up from a raccoon some of our Birds are easy to get a hold of so we are trying our hardest to get this done so that we can get them all locked in every single night and there's no way for anything to be able to dig in dig under dig around go above Etc this will be their new home and it's pretty big it's uh 16 by 20. a pretty good size anyway that was it just that one problem we're having just wondering if there was any quick Solutions thanks for all of your support as always and take care

Channel: Genetry Homestead

Views: 3,779

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Id: ogepwm-IPeI

Length: 9min 51sec (591 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 09 2023