Building a Manual Baler

So last week I built a manual hay baler out of scrap wood that I found in the barn (plus a few bolts and hinges that I bought, probably no more than $30 total).

I thought I would document the saga of putting it together, seeing as I could not find any good plans anywhere.

This thread will continue as I continue to make adjustments to the design as I pressure test the piece of equipment. Right now I am in need of replacing some wood that split because it couldn't take the pressure, but we'll get to that further along in the saga. I will try and give dimensions for everything so that hopefully this information could be used to make plans in the future (once I am happy with the design). Keep in mind that I am using scrap wood that I found in the barn that could be about a hundred years old, so some of the older wood pieces are not the same dimensions that modern lumber yards typically sell.

I'm also trying to come up with a good name for the baler so if anyone has any good ideas comment below! So far we've thought of "Bale-y" or "Bale-erina." Extra points for puns.

So here it is...

So first I had to gather all the wood I could find and put it in a single place. I found wood tucked away in every outbuilding and I started setting up a boneyard on a side of the house we hardly ever use. Once I could see what I was working with, I was able to figure it out as I went. I tried to copy a lot of the design from the Wheaton Labs bailer but I had a lot more small pieces and not enough longer pieces to copy the design completely.

I looked up the standard size of a two-string hay bale and the most consistent answer I found was 35 x 14 x 18 inches, so that's what I went off of.

Here is my boneyard-in-progress along with the first two pieces that I built the whole baler on top of. These are two four-by-fours (3.5 x 3.5 inches) that I cut to be about 52 inches long. I'm going to call these the skids, although I think I need to shape the ends to be more like skiis to make it skid properly.



I don't know what these pieces are called but they have slots in them so they can interlock. I cut these to be 18 inches in width and then I laid them down over the skids and screwed them into place. At first I screwed them straight in and had them crack a little bit and then I learned that I should drill pilot holes first and that reduced the splitting in the wood. I ended up with a tiny little deck with 16 boards going across. The overhang the skids slightly on one end, which is the platform end that is not going to have anything else added to it. It's so pretty!






Next I started building the door. I took two horizontal two-by-fours (1.5 x 3.5 inches) and cut them to be 18 inches for the width of the door and then I put two vertical two-by-sixes (1.5 x 5.5 inches) on either side of one vertical two-by-four (1.5 x 3.5 inches) spaced about evenly across the 18 inches. The length of these vertical pieces was 35 inches. After I got the whole baler assembled, I realized that the door wouldn't open all the way and it made it very difficult to get the bale out, so I ended up chopping off a couple inches from the horizontal two-by-fours on the right side.




I placed the door approximately where I wanted it and started working on the sides. I got these cool right-angle clamps off of Amazon and discovered that in a lot of cases I could not get a perfect right angle either because the wood was slightly warped or I could not get a perfectly straight cut because all I have to cut the wood with is a circular saw and my eyeballs. Anyway, for the sides I started by mounting a two-by-four (1.5 x 3.5 inches) on the side of the skid that was 14 inches long.




I then cut two two-by-twos (1.5 x 1.5 inches) and screwed them to the outside of the 14-inch piece and then started stacking more two-by-fours on top of the first one. I didn't line up the bottom of the two-by-twos exactly with the two-by-four, I had some idea about how the tops of these pieces were going to fit together and I ended up changing my mind after I realized that I needed the sides to be sturdier because they were leaning outward quite a bit.







I labelled my drill "Holes" and my impact driver "Screws" because for most of my life I thought these were the same tool.



On the left side, I made one piece in a middle a few inches longer for the door latch.


And then I did the same thing for the other side.




Here I am drilling the pilot holes to screw these boards in, like I learned for the platform.

https://permies.com/t/283212/a/272205/thumb-IMG_20250813_171327_717.jpg

Since I was figuring out what would fit together as I went, I did a lot of clamping and screwing things together in place instead of building the pieces in a normal way and then assembling everything at the end.




So once I realized that the sides needed to be sturdier, I placed these old, large two-by-fours (3.75 x 2.25 inches - maybe I shouldn't call these two-by-fours?) on the corners to try and add extra sturdiness. I cut these pieces 42 inches in length and I put one on each corner. I had to cut a chunk out of one of them to make room for the door latch. Having this extra piece on the right side also allowed for the door to have enough space so that the inside of the baler would still be 14 inches deep to make the bale the right size.



Here I am checking that the door is going to fit.



Here I realized that the two sides on either end of the door don't quite line up. If I put an extra piece on one side and try connecting them and forcing them into the proper box shape I can get them to line up enough for the door to fit right. This is where I started getting really discouraged about not making everything perfectly straight and lined up.



I eventually ended up screwing some two-by-twos (1.5 x 1.5 inches) into the tops of the corner pieces to hold the box together. You can see that they're not perfectly lined up. But I got the door on and clamped a piece onto the door to see where the latch would end up and it seemed to be good enough. I screwed a 1/2-inch hole into the door and the latch and put a 4-inch long 7/16-inch diameter bolt into the hole with washers on each side. I eventually attached another small piece to the latch for the door, although it took a couple tries to get a small piece that wouldn't split on me.





For the back I did not have enough two-by-sixes to match the same pattern as the door, so I did a vertical two-by-six in the middle and two two-by-fours on the outside and just spaced them evenly across the back. I cut these about 38 inches long. To attach them, I put a two-by-four (1.5 x 3.5 inches) on the end of the platform with the top of it flush with the top of the platform. This piece is 18 inches long and the vertical pieces are sitting on top of it. I put another 18-inch long two-by-four on the outside slightly higher that the vertical pieces are screwed into (so there are two 18-inch long two-by-fours on the bottom here). At the top I put one 18-inch long two-by-four on the inside of the two-by-two with the top of it lined up with the top of the two-by-two and half of it sticking down for the vertical pieces to be screwed into. The bottom of this upper two-by-two gives a good guide for how high to stack the bale since it's close to 35 inches above the platform.




And here is the completed box on the platform!


The next step is the whole pressing foot and arm assembly (at least that's what I'm calling it)...

So for the pressing foot assembly...

I grabbed the longest pieces of two-by-four (1.5 x 3.5 inches) I had. For this first piece I drilled three 1/2-inch holes about an inch apart on the end of the board because I wasn't sure how high I wanted this part to go and I wanted to adjust it. I mounted it on the back of the baler in the center. I screwed it into the center two-by-six from the inside and then I supported it with an extra 18-inch two-by-four underneath it and a couple of two-by-four pieces at the top to lock it into place so it wouldn't wobble from side to side. I don't think the height or length of this piece is super important as long as you have multiple holes so you can adjust the height of the arm and the piece is attached down below enough that it is supported. I can measure these pieces at some point if that proves to be important.





For the middle section of the arm assembly, I took two two-by-fours (1.5 x 3.5 inches) and drilled two holes on one end and three in the middle. After pressure testing this, however, I am planning on replacing these pieces with longer pieces and putting two more holes on the other end to attach the lever, spaced further apart so there's more distribution of weight since this is where most of the stress of pressing will go. The hole clusters you see here are about an inch apart from each other and they're all 1/2-inch holes. There are multiple holes so that the spacing can be adjusted.



Here's how these pieces fit together, with another two-by-four (1.5 x 3.5 inches) hanging down in the middle for the pressing foot. This pressing foot piece has four holes in it so you can adjust the height. I found that the two pieces holding this piece in place are slightly warped so this piece is not held in super tight, even with the bolt tightened all the way. I ended up putting a washer between each piece of wood to try and make this a little tighter.




Here I am trying to fit the pieces of the pressing foot together. I made the foot itself 17 inches long and 10.5 inches wide. I put a bolt through the pieces that attached to the vertical piece so that I can remove it and replace the foot if I want. The most frustrating part of this was the fact that my 1/2-inch drill bit wouldn't go all the way through all three pieces of wood and I was worried about things not lining up so I drilled through one end and then had to guess where the hole was to drill through the other end to meet it but I actually did a pretty good job finding the right spot and the washers actually help to account for any slight imperfections with where I put the hole.





When you lift the lever, the pressing foot gets a little bit caught on the lip since everything isn't perfectly straight, but it's not a huge deal to just get used to moving it out of the way while you're lifting it up. It's just a movement you get used to while using it.



So the handle goes between the two arms and this is the attachment I am going to be playing with the most to get it to be able to handle more stress. I tried screwing it on and that was not strong enough. I tried putting pieces of wood on the top and bottom to keep it in place and that was not enough. I think the arms and the handle just need to overlap a lot more.



Next we dragged it out to the barn to test it out! This is not something you can move with one person, unless you put wheels on it maybe.

So for the first test...

Here is the baler out by the barn.



I found a bucket of twine in the barn. No idea if this is the "proper" twine for this but I'm using it.



We started by just laying the twine down at the bottom.




We packed it full of cut grass from the field.


The foot was too loose and kept getting in the way so we propped it up on some blocks.




Baling hay can be a group activity. Here is Garbanzo helping us carry straw over to the baler.


The pressing foot works really well!


It takes multiple presses to get as much packed in as you can get.


Action shot of the arm getting pressed down.


Uh-oh, the handle is coming off from the pressure. We had to be gentle with it the rest of the way.



We had to thread the twine around the back and up and over to the front inside the baler to get it to the front and then tied knots. I realized we didn't know what kinds of knots to tie at this point so I just winged it.


I forgot to get a picture of us opening the door and trying to get the bale out but it took two people to try and pull it out because the door was in the way.

After finally prying it loose, here is our first messy bale!

Some adjustments I made after the first bale...

I cut off part of the door so that it could open all the way. I also added some guides for the handle to rest once it's pressed down all the way to try and minimize the amount of bending when you press down. And if you want you can rest the foot on these guides.






I put a couple of bolts in to hold the handle. I replaced the handle piece with a larger two-by-four I found in the barn. Unfortunately, this one split pretty quickly and then the arms started splitting. I tried to keep it on by screwing another small piece of two-by-four to the bottom to keep it wedged in but it just wasn't strong enough. Tomorrow I'm planning on getting some new wood to re-do these three pieces of the arm and make it longer.






I put a couple of washers between the arms and the pressing foot piece to add a little more friction. I also figured out that I can rest the longer handle on the roof of the barn and I can keep the pressing foot straight up in the air to keep it out of the way. This made it much easier to load.



I also put some hooks on the back to keep the twine.


Bale #2 (right) next to bale #1 (left)


Ah. So majestic.

so what are the bales used for?

So far the plan is to keep some for chicken bedding through the winter and give the rest to our neighbor for his goats. His field apparently didn't grow very much and he asked if he could have some of our grass if he could get it baled. But he couldn't find any equipment that was not already in use so we just bought a scythe and started cutting it by hand. We hadn't really thought of using the field until we could get fencing put in for livestock but this situation kicked us into gear this year even though the summer is almost over. I'm hoping next year we can get started mowing the field earlier in the season now that we have the equipment. Maybe I can use some for gardening, too. What are some other good uses for straw?

It just looks to be a very slow method.

Feedstock for biochar! Grasses have high levels of minerals like silica and these enhance a lot of the benefits of biochar in soil and animal feeding applications. Just look at all those dark prairie soils for proof....

You pretty much need a retort of some sort to do it well, as it doesn't lend itself to flame cap methods like a pit, trench, bathtub, etc. I have done a bale of old hay in a steel trough but it required lots of stirring and I would want a custom tool for this instead of having to wrap my pitchfork handle with tinfoil like I did.

John C Daley wrote:It just looks to be a very slow method.

It seems to me that when time is not an issue and the weather is good, it is a good form of exercise plus you end up with bales.

Today I replaced the arms and handle with some new wood I got in town yesterday and it seems to be holding up! I altered how these are attached slightly.

Also I was able to hold the pressing foot down while I tied off the bale so I got my first actually pretty square bale!

At first I attached the arms with the end of them not sticking out the back at all but when I tried pulling down on the lever it seemed to be strained so I ended up moving the arms further back. When I lift the lever the backside of these are a little in the way but it's not bad. I made the arms 4 feet long out of two-by-fours (1.5 x 3.5 inches). The handle is 6 ft long and attaches to the arms with a couple of bolts (not screws like I did before).








The bale makes a great seat!


Here is the new bale (right) compared to the first two bales made when the handle was still struggling not to break. So much more bale-shaped!


I'd say the baler is complete! I'll be making lots more bales soon so I can really pressure-test it.

Update: I named the bailer CRUSH-EE because it crushes things. I made a wood-burned sign to go on it.



Here is the sign-making process:

Hal,
The baler is fabulous.  The trial and error means you have a tried and tested product. If you put a plan on Permies, I would fork out some cash to buy a copy.
Looking forward to more projects.