Best Chain for Fire damaged barn cleanup?

[timistall]

Finnbear, If you will send me your size chains that you need, I'll send you two new chains free. I would like to have the same treatment if I had a loss. Tony

Hats off to you, what an offer! None of my dealers would do that around my area.

 

[RiverRat2]

Ditto on the small track hoe!!!

sorry to hear abolut your loss FB,,,
stay safe,,,,,

 

[SawTroll]

Buy a metal detector - even one of the Home depot $60 Zircon units used for finding rebar in concrete.. It will tell you if there is a nail in a beam...

Sorry for your loss.

Personally, I'd get a small track hoe in, drag it all out, stack it up and burn..

Sorry to hear about such a loss Finnbear

as for the timbers, i would avoid crawling around in the wreckage......if the beams are twisted up or under tension, you may be placing your safety at risk if you cut a beam and it shifts, or causes another beam to shift onto you. I would highly recomend the use of a backhoe or similar, with some chocker cables to pull everything apart. SAFETY FIRST!

Ditto, doesn't look like a job for chainsaws at all to me.

Sorry for your loss, Finnbear.......... :bang: :bang:

Btw, maybe the insurense cover clean-up as well as damage?

 

[Finnbear]

Thanks for everyone that replied with advice and concern. It would take forever to reply to each of you so I'll just do one long winded rambling post before I crash tonite. I've been running on coffee and aspirin for two days and I'm just about wore out. The building and 99% of the contents are a total loss but I just keep telling myself that it is all just "stuff" and none of my kids got hurt so the "stuff" really doesn't matter in the long run. If I don't convince myself of this I'll probably lose my mind. I just have to get over it and move on with life. I'll be fine doing the clean-up work. It takes my mind off the enormity of what just happened. This kind of work might seem dangerous to some, but I come from a family of "can do" kind of people who are capable of just about anything and have sense enough to do it safely. I've worked construction in the past and have also done some disaster-relief work over the years. As for the saw chains, I had about 6 mostly worn out chains for my 038 laying around and a ragged old 20" Duromatic solid nose bar that I touched up with a file the other nite to make it useable. Lots of help showed up Saturday and it turned out that I wouldn't have had time to get a carbide chain to try anyway. I just ended up (ab)using some of the old chains I have to get the beams cut up. I'm not done cutting them all yet but I got probably 3/4 of them carved up into pieces small enough for two guys to throw on the fire. The barn was a 35x70 bank barn with a gambrel style roof and a couple overhangs and it was stuffed full. It was pretty tall and a 24ft ladder inside the building wouldn't get me up to the windows on each end up in the hay mow. Post-n-beam construction built in 1939 and was in excellent shape with tongue-n-groove 1x8 barn siding. The roof tin was all in good shape with no leaks and the barn was straight and solid with no sags anywhere. It would cost more to build a barn like this today than my whole place is worth. I've still got some piles that are burning inside of the barn foundation and a good sized pile of wet straw that is still smoldering. The fire dept did a heck of a job saving my shop building (6 years old-metal sided and roof) which is about 30 feet in front of the old barn. The fire chief and I decided to let the barn finish burning (controlled) while protecting my shop in front of it since the barn was too far gone to try and save it or the contents and there would be less to clean up that way. A couple neighbors showed up to work Saturday along with some family and friends and we got a lot cleaned up. I still have a LOT to do. We loaded a couple hundred 2ftx10ft and 12ft sheets of corrugated steel roof sheeting today. It was all bent up but surprisingly easy to lay out on the ground and stomp it out flat to load on trailers. The steel turned soft from being heated so much and all the tensile strength is gone. One neighbor has an old wore out JD backhoe that we used to drag the tractor carcasses (Case 430 utility, Farmall 404 row crop, and Farmall Cub) out along with a couple other big pieces. We used it to load a burnt '90 Chevy Caprice on my car trailer. The Farmall 404 might be OK for salvage or a total restore job since it was in the lower part of the barn and didn't get as hot as the others. It would be a total disassemble and restore job and all the sheetmetal would have to be replaced if you could find it along with a ton of small parts. Some collector might want this one since it is a fairly rare model with low production numbers. The Case 430 got so hot (glowing red) that the steel front axle beam bent in the middle. It got pretty banged up when it fell thru the barn floor to the concrete floor below. The Farmall Cub was in the lower part of the barn but a 1990 Chevy Caprice fell on top of it when the barn floor burned through. I also lost a 2-bottom plow, a disc, a back-blade, and a cultipacker. My only tractor that wasn't in the barn is a little Farmall 140 and we used it to drag beams out back to a fire pile. The beams are all 8x8 red oak mostly charred on a couple sides. We found a couple timbers from the front wall that were 35 feet long, 8"x8" red oak-all one piece. That stuff is hard as hell and the charred parts make some nasty dust that plugs the air filter on the saw quickly. I've hit a few nails and there will be a few of these old chains in the scrap pile before I'm done. We started sorting the iron out of the mess yesterday and there is probably 15 or 20 tons total. I'm a bit of a collector of "stuff" and I also do some machine work, some fabricating, and some repair work. I had about a 15 year accumulation of "stuff". There are two Troy-Bilt Horse tillers, a Roto-Hoe leaf blower, an ExMark 48" commercial walk-behind mower, a Cushman Truckster, and seven old Gravely walker tractors (4 of them ran) with about a dozen attachments I lost. Also a tube frame VW dune buggy, a Lincoln SA200 welder, a 15HP roto-phase unit, a W&S #3 turret lathe with over 1/2 ton of tooling, a Welsaw bandsaw, a 5HP 80 gallon air compressor, an old Sears tablesaw, a radial arm saw, a couple mini-bikes that my kids ride, a gas powered water pump, a nearly new Porter-Cable sawsall, a couple HD 1/2" drill motors, a couple Senco air nailers, a drill press, a 75k btu torpedo heater, and so many hand tools you wouldn't believe it. There were also three plies (about 2800 board feet) of stacked and stickered roughsawn Cherry, Ash, Oak, and Maple lumber that was air drying up in the top of the barn. I've started an inventory list of all the stuff we've found in the rubble and it is probably going to scare the heck out of the insurance adjuster who is supposed to come out tomorrow. I suppose he is going to scare the heck out of me with what they want to pay me as a settlement which I'm sure won't even begin to cover my loss. One of my farmer neighbors stopped by today and told me about a private insurance adjuster they used a few years back when they had a barn fire who got them over double the settlement that the insurance company was offering them. I may have to go this route if I don't like their numbers. The insurance did say they will pay for the clean-up but I had lots of willing help this weekend and I couldn't sit here all weekend looking at this mess waiting for the insurance guy to show up during business hours on Monday. I'd have lost my mind by now and besides, I need to sort through all this myself to figure out just what I lost. Once I've hauled all the scrap metal I'll have an excavator friend come with a track hoe and tandem dump trucks to get rid of the old foundation and grade everything out. He says insurance jobs like this pay well and hell be glad to do it. I now realize why I've felt like I was always broke for the last 15 years-somebody had to pay for all this stuff. I can probably blame my Dad for that too since he taught me that when you need tools to do a job you just go buy the best you can find and the tools will eventually pay for themselves. Mom always did the books for Dad's business and I can remember as a kid hearing her giving him hell so many times for spending too much on tools and him saying that he had to have them to do the job the right way. I've rambled way too much so I'm going to hit the sack now. Thanks again for all your concerns.
Finn