[fisherhunter460]

20'x4'x4'. That's a decent 5 man pit in my opinion. 4' deep is a pretty decent for kids and short people. My sister in law is about 5'2" and has a hard time getting up and shooting out of any thing deeper than that. Not much head room for taller guys, but they just have to slouch a bit. Or, think about the shortest member of your hunting party and measure up to breast height and go from there.

 

[fisherhunter460]

I'd allow 3 feet per man

This is pretty well spot on. The average shoulder width of an adult male is about 20". Based on the fact that most of us aren't average you are more likely to see 24". Add on the bulky cold weather gear and you are looking at 28"-30" plus a little space for gear. You could base your width on the cockpit width of your layout blind.

 

[fisherhunter460]

Yeah I was thinking 4 feet wide and 4 ft deep. Most likely 12 feet or so long. Mainly for 4 guys but most of the time it prob wouldn't be that. I was going to frame up a box and drop it into the hole. Plywood walls andfloor with a bench. I have been looking at some pics and some of these pit blinds. You could have a party in there. Not looking to cook n clean in the thing.

Just make sure you go deeper than four and take yourself out a drain to give the water that is bound to get in there somewhere to go. Gravel, sand, something other than clay, otherwise you'll be hunting out of waders or need to invest in a decent trash pump.

Yup! We have to pump out our pits most every morning we hunt if there has been any amount of rain. Only we don't have room to haul a trash pump. So we have a little hand pump, 12 gals/min. We estimated one day about 800 gals of water we had to pump.

As far as lids go. We use some sort of grass. I have no clue what it is called. We take an 18" wide piece of ply board and put it on the back of the blind. Then we lay the grass across the top of it. From there we tie down using a two lengths of wire so the wind can't blow it away. We do have to add some more later in the season because it breaks off. It works well.

 

[fisherhunter460]

Most pit blinds leave a large foot print. It's almost unavoidable. The only way to keep that from happening is to haul all the excess dirt away. I've seen a lot of pits from the car that just stick out because of this. You would also have to try and make the roof about 1"-2" below the top of the dirt so it stays flush when you brush it.