StarPlate construction day 1
There's a small learning
curve on this new star
plate building method.
We plan to level up the
downhill side when we get the roof frame on.
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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I am very excited to see this project! And it looks to be very good sized.
I am debating on the design and "permanence" in building a coop for my laying hens and multipurposing the space for brooding chicks and well as seedling starting.
I've tried a cattle panel "hoop coop" but and not overly impresses with it. A bit too flimsy and less than secure. Is moving the dome in the plans? As in utilizing electic net fencing and moving the chickens. Can't wait to see developments and the implementation of this dome used for poultry housing. Always a plus to learn from good folks like Mark and Anna. Thanks.
Kenny --- Our farm isn't really appropriate for electric fences, for reasons too complicated to go into here. So this will be a stationary coop with paddocks that we rotate the animals through encircling it.
However, I'd say you could definitely make one of these starplate coops moveable as long as you keep whatever you finish it with light. (Perhaps mostly hardware cloth if you're just doing broilers in the summer.) Once you get all of the triangles together, it's astonishingly solid and resilient.
Anna, that's construction 101. Triangles are inherently stable structures, even if the ends are just pinned together. That's the main reason trusses are made out of triangles.
If you want to make a stable rectangle (like your chicken pasture doors) you either have to brace the corners or add a cross beam. In the latter case, it would really be two triangles sharing one side.
Sam --- Yep, our coop (turned goat shed) is finished and happily housing critters. You might enjoy this post for overall thoughts on the process or this one about putting on the roof.
To answer your actual question...I'm guessing you mean the ends of the two by fours where they go into the metal starplate bracket? If so, then no we didn't bevel them --- we just used the square ended struts.