Backyard Aquaponics
A place to discuss aquaponics

I have run into a problem that my limited woodworking experience doesn't include a solution for. It's somewhat tangentially related to AP, because it involves tools I'll need for building my AP system.

I used one of my hole saw bits to drill a hole in Gbaby's play structure for her climbing rope, and now my hole saw bit is stuffed with wood.

How does one get the hole out of the bit once it's been drilled out of the wood? 'Cause until that happens, there won't be any 7/8" holes being drilled in any AP components. (I'm not entirely sure I'll *need* 7/8" holes. But I might!)

Usually there are slots in the sides of the hole saw and/or holes in the back. You use a flathead screwdriver in the holes/slots to extract the wood. (You can go around the different sides if it gets stuck at an angle.)

If you can't access from the side, try putting in 2 long screws into the face of the wood. Then wiggle the screws back and forth.

Take the battery out if its a cordless drill. Or unplug it if its an electric drill.

If there aren't any slots in the sides of the hole saw, try a sharp common (flathead) screwdriver to pry pieces of the wood out. Not all at once, just pieces. There is a grain or what looks like "lines" in the wood, turn your screwdriver in parallel with the grain and pry away. Just don't try to do it all at once against where the metal bit and the wood meet. Probably will just warp the bit and it'll be useless. Wear gloves. Take your time and work at it. Think happy thoughts. No cussin.

What type of wood were you drilling, plywood or regular wood? Regular wood should come out with a bit of chipping away at it. Plywood will take a bit more work as it is layers of thin wood layed on top of one another.

Next time, wobble the hole saw back and forth, round and round as you drill. This makes the hole a bit larger than the hole saw and the piece that you cut out a bit smaller than the hole saw. Makes the pieces come out much easier. Also keep a few pieces of soap in the toolbox to smear inside the bit before you drill. Helps the pieces come out a bit easier.

I found that If I left one disk in, all the others fell out by them selves. But that was only cutting PVC, and it was curved and springy, and it did explode in my face.

But my hole saw has two holes in it to take a plate that help it resist it's desire to stay stationary and have the D shaped hole in the back that grips the saw turn into a round hole. Those two holes offer a place to stick a nail through and poke out the wood. But it has to be pulled apart to get to the holes.

So I guess I'm saying, can you pull it apart?

[sorry for some reason I didn't notice that it was already answered]

Uh, you actually just need to detach the center bit, and then you can poke something in from the back and pop the wood out

Thanks, everybody! I will give it a go tomorrow and see what I can accomplish. It's wood from a 2x4, not plywood, but it's only a 7/8" hole bit, so it's kinda tight for digging things out of. Taking the bit out should help, though. I wish I'd known about the wobbling trick; I'll use that next time for sure!

Still waiting for my greenhouse-building guy to get done with the fence job that's keeping him busy, so I can get serious about starting on my AP stuff. Although my own temporary 2nd job is eating up all my extra time and energy this month, so the delay is probably not really delaying anything anyway.

I gained an extra day off tomorrow by trading a day with my psychiatrist coworker so he can go shoot at elk for the opening of hunting season next week, so I am going to use it for making a rain barrel to use for watering the goats. That will get me started on gaining a little bit of plastic-drilling and plumbing experience. And then I will find out whether the jury-rigged method I dreamed up for hanging gutters from the tin roof overhang on their shed (to feed the rain barrel) will actually work.

Depending on the type of hole saw and how the center bit is mounted/attached, simply taking that out may be all you need to do to knock the wood bit out. Otherwise it will give you and extra hole to push or pop the wood out with.

for future reference, if you drill the center hole all the way through but stop before you get all the way through with the hole saw and then go finish the hole from the other side, it makes it a lot easier to remove the plug from the hole saw. This will be a really handy tip if you ever do holes in foam for rafts.

I actually did think of the "finish from the other side" trick, but would've had to climb the "climbing wall" on the play structure to manage that, and I just wasn't feeling that adventurous.

I used to do stupid stuff with ladders and precarious climbing places all the time. But now I work in the hospital, and when I start to do something stupid, I have mental images of being rushed to my own emergency department and having to explain what I've done to myself.

I'm not sure that counts as older and wiser, but at least the outcome is the same.

I've kinda gone back to the drawing board on my imaginary AP system, since I came to the conclusion that building growbeds from wood and liner is probably more labor-intensive than I can handle right now, with my primitive woodworking skills and severe lack of spare time.

I currently own 2 IBCs (the smaller 275-gal ones), a 100-gal Rubbermaid stock tank, and 2 55-gal plastic barrels with screw-on tops. (3, actually, but one of them is going to be the rain barrel for the goat water.)

Bullwinkle suggested I cut the tops off both IBCs and make 2 fish tanks, each with a grow bed, and then expand from there later...but I think that might end up being too much fish tank for my 10'x30' greenhouse, because I don't think I'd ever be able to get to an ideal GB:FT volume in the space I'll have. So then I thought about either 1) cutting the top off one, and the top and bottom off the other, and having a fish tank and 3 grow beds, or 2) Leaving one intact as a larger fish tank and cutting the second one into two grow beds. Either way, I'd use the stock tank as the sump, and eventually add a second (and maybe third) one.

Bullwinkle also suggested lowering one of the grow beds to do double-duty as both GB and sump, which is a cool idea that I'm still chewing on. Or maybe, to save my back come planting time, I'll go back to my Prof. Erwin Corey doppelgänger guy and get some of the blue barrels that could be cut in half to grow trees in, which could contribute sump volume with less stooping on my part...but more plumbing, since it would take more of them.

(The 2 barrels I have are far too nice to cut. Hubs got them for me, and he shouldn't have bought such nice, sturdy, decent-looking ones, because it would just be a shame to cut them, so now I have to find a use for them whole!)

If I'm understanding things correctly, to get to the ideal GB:FT ratio, I'd need, for option 1, to eventually add 2 more similar-sized grow beds, and for option 2, I'd need 4 more. Or an equivalent volume of barrel halves, etc. And to do the CHIFT PIST setup that still appeals most to me, I'd also need additional sump volume to handle it all.

I keep going round and round with the possible options, and not knowing which way to go. One of my questions is whether I'm getting too stuck on the "proper" ratios. I think, when I analyze my priorities, that my primary goal is to have as much grow bed space as I can, because ultimately, it's the "growing things" part of this that appeals to me the most.

I guess I need to keep banging on Sketchup to try to see what would fit best into my greenhouse. (I haven't figured out how to slice IBCs in it yet, and the IBC image I found is so nice I just can't bring myself to go back to using generic blocks to represent them!)

But anyway...that's where things are at the moment, with my nonexistant system. :-/

I think the "ideal" ratio is about how many fish you can stock and still have enough water between them to keep them wet [and the amount of growbed you need to support this].

You can vary it quite a bit, but you just stock with fish accordingly. You can also vary the amount of fish a bit, because it really comes down to how many fish you have + how much you feed them. All food in is nutrient in.

With this in mind, I just kept adding food into my system, a little more each week, until I discovered how much food I can put in one day, and still see no ammonia and nitrites on my water tests. From there I just backed it off a little, found a container that allowed me to fill it in the morning, and never feed them any more than that container full no matter how much they begged.

Personally I think that ratio should be expressed in some other way because I dont think it tells the real story.

If I was writing the rules, I'd want to say something more like - feed no more than x % of the volume of you growbeds or something.

Most people under-do the growbeds I think.

But keep in mind that I was also going to suggest "white ants and patience", for removing the stuck hole from your hole saw, so...

So, where're the pics ?

At 7/8" I would use a forsner bit instead of a hole saw in 2x4s. The trick to splitting IBCs in sketchup is to use the plane tool, put it where you want to split it, delete half, save the remander as a different object, revert back to before you deleted the first half, then delete the second half, name that as another object, and there you are with two brand new objects ready to be placed where ever your heart desires.

I posted pics of my IBCs a few days ago...that's as far as it's gotten. Yesterday I swept off the goat shed roof to start on the rain barrel catchment system. I could post photos of that, I suppose, but it's not really aquaponics...I guess I could put some goldfish in the water trough...but the goats would eat anything I tried to put in grow beds!

Thanks! I'll look for the plane tool.

Just got a line on a $30 IBC -- guy accidentally made a hole in it, so he can't use it now. I can get a grow bed out of it, or maybe two, so $30 sounds like a fine price to me.