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Anyone use (modified) dcoats plans for full size boxes?

952 Views 3 Replies 4 Participants Last post by  NorthMaine
I currently use a modified version of dcoats 5 frame nuc plans for my nucs. Mostly I use 3/4 inch material instead of 1/2 inch. Also I get a lot of free OSB, some plywood and a little sub flooring. Being It is free I use it. I don't care if the OSB box is only going to last three years because it only cost glue, staples and paint.

At any rate I was wondering if anyone has use the basic build technique to build eight or ten frame deeps?

I am seriously considering making four just as an experiment this season.
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I had some extra osb laying around this winter so I built 8 of them, can not say how good they will hold up yet. I will find out this spring.
I don’t like the plans in general. The idea yes. I use for the ends and and bottom real wood. And 3/8 or 1/2 plywood for the sides. Thinking of doing some lids out of cement board. This year.
There is a southern gentleman that makes his boxes out of plywood, but if you watch his videos you will see that quite a bit of it warps/twists and can open holes here and there as they don't sit squarely on top of each other, seemingly more than the smaller box warps. He doesn't care and has stated so in one of his videos as cost is his main issue (gets free scrap plywood and has time as he is retired), but I think it causes some of his hives to be more defensive as they are fighting off intruders so much in the gaps. During the winter the videos give me a cure for missing the bees (would love to spend a few winter months in Florida helping someone rather than watching tv) but at this point I would rather just pay the Amish to make me a bunch of boxes than save the few dollars. Most of the dcoats version boxes I have made have gone and replaced with 4 or 5 frame boxes using conventional lumber. Yes, the plywood ones are a bit lighter, but the 4 frame boxes fit great doubled up on top of a 10 frame stack and usable in many ways where the fixed bottom on the dcoats nuc was more limited use. Personally feel that the fingered boxes when glued/screwed stay square better than the but joints and once you have some diamond shaped boxes and try to mate them to square boxes, you will know what I mean. Nothing you do gets em 'right' and you end up using a lot of duct tape to seal gaps, rip it off, replace, etc. So those boxes get sorted to the side as 'emergency' boxes and eventually lost in the clutter of the back of the barn as they are too big for a nuc and you would have to swap the frames out once they grew beyond one box and the lids/bottoms don't fit right anyways.
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