2019 - Volume #43, Issue #4, Page #24
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Baled Tires Handy For Many Uses
Rick Welle, founder of Front Range Tire in Colorado, continues to be amazed with ways customers use them, including building beautiful homes or farm buildings. He started his business in 1985 shredding tires into 2-in. chips for fuel and aggregate markets for civil engineering, and bought a tire baler in the mid-90s. Front Range Tire sells chips, bales and rubber mulch to customers in Colorado and surrounding states.
“We sell a lot of bales for windbreaks and snow fences up in northern Colorado, Wyoming and Nebraska where the winds are so terrible,” Welle says. Stacked like bricks 3 rows high, the bales create a 7 1/2-ft. tall wall to protect livestock in harsh weather and during calving.
Other rural customers use them for storage bins or fencing around feed bins. Five 9-ga. wires hold the bales together and are stacked so the wires aren’t exposed. Each bale is made up of 89 to 110 passenger and light truck tires.
“They can last basically forever, because rubber never deteriorates,” Welle says.
The bales and other products Front Range Tire sells take something that would be wasted and make it useful, taking advantage of the engineering that has gone into making the durable material.
They’re environmentally friendly with no odor and very strong. They can support 300,000 lb. equipment and are often used to create a loading dock or earth retaining walls. Water penetrates through them, so they are used as inside filler for dams as well as berms to minimize erosion and stabilize soil. They also make great backdrops at gun ranges.
Besides ag and industry applications, Welle has been impressed with homes he has seen built with the bales www.hagartirebales.com and other uses that can be found by searching “tire bales” in the internet.
Bales typically sell for $65, but Front Range Tire has them on sale for $25 through the end of September 2019.
Contact: FARM SHOW Followup, Front Runner Rubber Mulch, P.O. Box 184, Sedalia, Colo. 80135 (ph 303 660-0090; www.frrubbermulch.com; info@tiredisposalrecycling.com).
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