Six revolving tubes filled with eggs; the Hexahatch Revolution Incubator design is done and we will be building it tomorrow as part of a workshop. The design is open source on the wiki, complete with bill of materials and implementation plan. The cost looks to be about $70. Here’s a quick animation of the design and some pictures below:
The 15 chickens at Factor e Farm are producing about enough eggs for me and Marcin, so with more people we will need a much larger flock to be egg self-sufficient.The Hexahatch can hold about 42 eggs at a time, and chickens take 21 days to hatch, so we could be getting up to 42 new chicks a month for the rest of this year!
On your Wiki, you might note that bantam is a size, not a breed. There are hundreds of different breeds in the bantam size, and any that have a large fowl counterpart tend to have the same traits. So there are breeds of bantams that are good broodies, and breeds that are not. There are also many breeds of large fowl that make excellent broodies. Also, the reason for turning eggs is because the embryo will become stuck to one side of the egg otherwise. I’m interested to hear how your design turns out, it looks in some ways similar to my favourite incubator models, the Brinsea Octagon series.
Thanks Cat! I added the info to the wiki. Maybe that incubator design will have some insights into what else is needed, they looked expensive from a quick search,
Permaculture is about is about capturing surplus value from largely self-sustaining systems, so I have to ask- why not let the chickens do it?
this is about natural incubation with native Philippine chickens, but it aught to be applicable:
http://www.agnet.org/library/pt/2003007/
[…] the last few weeks I’ve constructed the Hexahatch egg incubator and am now testing it. Here are some pictures of how to make it: It started with Marcin drawing up […]
[…] explains how to build a chicken incubator in which 107 eggs can be placed. This is evolution of our previous work from last year, where we go from a forced-air to a still-air, automatic egg-turning incubator. This 8 minute video […]