11/08/2020
Rolfe Designs
Safe Catch Cattle Crush.
Firstly I'd like to say that I started out in a family operation where we bought a large undeveloped cattle property near Springsure in central Queensland in 1980. In 2001 my wife Neiliya & I moved to Armidale where we bought properties near Ebor & Guyra. We ran cattle on all these places & so over the years we have strived to make cattle handling as safe as possible. It wasn't until we moved to the Armidale district when I only had my wife & 2 daughters to help, that I started designing a 12volt hydraulic cattle crush & hydraulic curved race to make it easier & safer for us & also for the cattle. So 15 years later & 4 crushes later I've got the design that I'm happy with. After I built the 3rd crush (the normal lever action crush) I involved a hydraulics engineer& we took all the pressure readings we needed & I involved a mechanical engineer & we redesigned the whole crush where we didn't use levers giving us a greatly superior mechanically efficient crush. I now have a remote controlled, solar charged, battery powered, fully self contained, quiet cattle crush that has a rear & front head bale & a separate top & bottom side squeeze making it safer than a parallel Squeeze. Now there's no need for noisy generators or air compressors that stir the cattle up & irritate the operators & being remote controlled, you don't have to be beside the crush to operate it, giving you the ability to push the beast up yourself. The next step was to test the crush, battery & solar panel when it was raining & the results were amazing. It was used for 12 hours in these conditions & the battery voltage barely dropped. Now that I've got the crush to the standard that I want, the sky's the limit. Full automation of crush, yards & drafting would be just the beginning. My contact details are; Greg Rolfe Ph 0427759252